Jennie's Book Garden

Jennie has a new website!

2011-09-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

News and recommendations from Jennie's Book Garden can now be viewed here: Jennie's New Website

I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME by Per Petterson

2011-09-22T21:47:00.000-07:00

source: Words Without Borders
Reviewed by Mythili G. Rao

“He’s thirty-seven years old, but I wouldn’t call him a grown up. That would be an exaggeration. He’s getting a divorce. I don’t know what to do with him.” These words, spoken by protagonist Arvid Janson’s weary mother in the final pages of Per Petterson’s latest novel, I Curse the River of Timeare an apt assessment. Newly diagnosed with stomach cancer, Arvid’s mother has left Norway for her hometown in Denmark, and Arvid, burdened with a host of ailments of his own, has followed her, his intentions unclear even to himself. Arvid wants to console and support his mother, (“Damn it, I knew she was ill, she might even die; that was why I was here, that was why I had come after her, I was sure of it,”) but not only is there an old, open wound of misunderstanding between mother and son to contend with, there is also the creaking failure of Arvid’s fifteen-year marriage weighing on him, as well as the final collapse of his political ideals to reconcile with:

“‘It’s me,’ I said.
‘I know who it is,’ she said. I heard your thoughts clatter all the way down from the road. Are you broke?’”

“Are you broke?” is the question Arvid’s mother used to playfully ask her son while he was still a carefree, penniless college student—before he dropped out of school to put his faith in Communism to test, trading an education for a production-line job at the factory where his father had labored for a lifetime, and leaving his mother (a factory worker herself) incensed. Arvid settled easily into the physical rhythms of the job and was convinced that the act of work was inherently important, but it did not take long for him to see that he had “joined the proletariat which did not actually exist anymore, but was an anachronism.” In breaking with the promise of his old life, he had become “a man out of time.”

Petterson has written about Arvid Jansen before. In the Wake finds its protagonist grappling with the horrific death of his parents and younger brothers in a ferry accident just like the one that took the lives of Petterson’s own parents and two of his three brothers two decades ago. The Arvid Jansen of I Curse the River of Time may still have two living parents and more than one living brother, but his story is still an unflinchingly dark one. read more....

MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN by Ransom Riggs

2011-09-18T13:20:00.000-07:00

source: Stainless Steel Droppings
By Carl V.

Several years ago I recall poo-pooing the concept of the book trailer. Experience has taught me that the quality of those early trailers had a lot to do with my assumptions about their value and effectiveness. That said, I had not been swayed to buy a book based on a book trailer. That all changed when the trailer for Ransom Riggs’ debut novel found its way to me on Twitter.

I watched it…

And I was lost…

It is easy for a young boy to believe the tales woven by a loving grandfather–of monsters, a magical home, and children with amazing powers. But as that boy matures his grandfather’s tales develop the taint of untruth and what once seemed so very real is now nothing more than fairy stories. So what if his grandfather had pictures of these children, pictures that in childhood were quite convincing? To the boy’s eye these photos now appear faked, doctored, impossible. And so the grandfather stopped telling the stories and a special bond was lost. Then one night tragedy struck and the now adolescent boy saw something–something that should not be real, could not be real. That one night will send the boy on a journey in which he discovers that truth is sometimes stranger, and scarier, than fiction. read more...

THE HIDDEN CHILD by Camilla Läckberg

2011-09-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

source: Nordic Bookblog
review by Peter

The Hidden Child (original title Tyskungen) is the fifth novel in Camilla Läckberg’s bestselling Swedish crime fiction series, and the sequel to The Gallows Bird.

Like many Swedish fathers, Detective Patrik Hedstrom has chosen to take a paternity leave to stay home for awhile with his one year old daughter Maja. His wife, Erica Falck, wants to spend this time writing a new crime book. However, they both have a hard time adjusting to the new situation. Erica has discovered her mother’s wartime diaries in her attic, along with a mysterious Nazi medal and a blood-stained baby shirt. Curious to learn more, she consults a local World War II historian about the medal and begins to read her mother’s diary.

Soon after, the ageing historian is found brutally murdered in his house, where he lives alone with his brother – a man engaged in the worldwide hunt for Nazi war criminals. Why has the historian been killed now, so long after the war? Did he represent a threat to the growing Neo-Nazi movement in Sweden? Did he have knowledge of long-hidden secrets from the war years in Sweden? read more....

Is this the end for books?

2011-09-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

source: The Guardian
by Sam Leith

From books to bytes … Willis's bookshop in Edinburgh, 1955. Photograph: John Murray/Getty Images

In 1996, the US computer entrepreneur Brewster Kahle set up the Internet Archive, its mission being to provide "universal access to all knowledge". This admirable project strives to store copies of every single web page ever posted: a ghostly archive of the virtual. So what are we to make of the fact that, a decade and a half later, this digital pioneer is turning from bytes to books? In what seems, on the face of it, an act of splendid perversity, Kahle has set up a series of converted shipping containers in California where he hopes to create another archive – one that contains a copy of every book ever published.

His action touches on an anxiety. Are books, like defunct internet pages, heading towards the point where they will be archived as an academic curiosity? Some think so. You won't find any shortage of people willing to pronounce the printed book doomed, arguing that the convenience and searchability of digital text and the emergence of a Kindle-first generation will render them obsolete.

Certainly, electronic books have overcome their technological obstacles. Page turns are fast enough, battery life is long enough, and screens are legible in sunlight. Digital sales now account for 14% of Penguin's business. But there are reasons to reject the idea that the extinction of the printed book is just around the corner, just as there were reasons to reject the notion that e-books would never catch on because you couldn't read them in the bath and, y'know, books are such lovely objects. read more...

Charlie Rose - An interview with David Foster Wallace

2011-09-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

THE CAT'S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje

2011-09-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

source: The Telegraph
By Beth Jones

Towards the end of Michael Ondaatje’s 1982 memoir, Running in the Family, is a chapter entitled “Harbour”. Describing the luxury liners, the blue tugs and the Maldive fishing vessels that skim out into the thick night air from Sri Lanka’s main port, the author recalls a “frail memory dragged up out of the past”: it is the early Fifties and he is going to the harbour to say goodbye to a family member at dusk.

It is the briefest of chapters, a mere 200-odd words, yet faint crepuscular memories are sketched with such deftness that it’s impossible not to imagine sailing out into the night upon dark infinite waters.

Turn the opening pages of Ondaatje’s sixth novel, The Cat’s Table, and this harbour landscape greets the mind’s eye once more. The narrator, Michael, is remembering himself as a boy of 11 waiting for the ocean liner Oronsay to sail from Colombo docks. This time he is a passenger himself, travelling alone on the 21-day voyage to England.

Each day of the crossing he dines at the cat’s table, Table 76, “the least privileged place” in the ship’s dining room, shared with a cast of misfits including two other boys, Ramadhin and Cassius. Exploring the ship, going where young boys shouldn’t, the three soon learn that what’s important “happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power”. read more....

THE WINTER OF THE LIONS by Jan Costin Wagner

2011-09-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

source: The Random House Group

Every year since the tragic death of his wife, Detective Kimmo Joentaa has prepared for the isolation of Christmas with a glass of milk and a bottle of vodka to arm himself against the harsh Finnish winter. However, this year events take an unexpected turn when a young woman turns up on his doorstep.

Not long afterwards two men are found murdered, one of whom is Joentaa’s colleague, a forensic pathologist. When it becomes clear that both victims had recently been guests on Finland’s most famous talk show, Kimmo is called upon to use all his powers of intuition and instinct to solve the case. Meanwhile the killer is lying in wait, ready to strike again…

In Kimmo Joentaa, prizewinning author Jan Costin Wagner has created a lonely hero in the Philip Marlowe mould, who uses his unusual gifts for psychological insight to delve deep inside the minds of the criminals he pursues.

The Paperback Game

2011-07-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

taken from the New York Times
written by DWIGHT GARNER

Here’s what you’ll need to play: slips of paper (index cards work well), a handful of pencils or pens and a pile of paperback books. Any sort of book will do, from a Dostoyevsky to a Jennifer Egan, and from diet guides to the Kama Sutra. But we’ve found it’s especially rewarding to use genre books: mysteries, romance novels, science fiction, pulp thrillers, westerns, the cheesier the better. If you don’t have well-thumbed mass-market paperbacks in your house, you can usually buy a pile from your library, or from a used-book store, for roughly 50 cents a pop.

Many people flee from games they fear will be public I.Q. tests or will expose gaps in their literary knowledge — their inability to differentiate between, say, Lily Bart and Isabel Archer, or between John Barth, Roland Barthes and Donald Barthelme. This is not that kind of game. A little learning helps. But I’ve seen precocious preteenagers wipe the floor with fairly elite published writers. Which is another way of saying that even nonmandarins can play the paperback game and sometimes win.

Once you’ve gathered your loved ones at the table — 4 to 10 is optimal — and opened fresh bottles of wine and perhaps put on an old Ry Cooder record, here is how the game unfolds. One player, the “picker” for this turn, selects a book from the pile and shows its cover around. Then he or she flips it over and reads aloud the often overwrought publisher-supplied copy on the back cover.

Hearing these descriptions read aloud is among the game’s distinct joys. Here is one example, from the back cover of a paperback titled “Paradise Wild” (1981), by Johanna Lindsey. Try to imagine the following recited in the voice of the fellow who does the husky voice-overs for coming attractions in theaters, or by your slightly tipsy best friend:

“A well-born Boston beauty, Corinne Barrows has traveled halfway around the world in search of Jared Burkett — a dashing rouge and a devil; a honey-tongued charmer who seduced and despoiled her ... and then abandoned the impetuous lady after awakening a need that only he could satisfy. She has found him on the lush and lovely island of Hawaii.” This goes on, but you get the idea.

One reason it’s less fun to play with serious rather than genre novels is that their back covers tend to contain phrases like “sweeping meditation on mortality and loss” rather than “a need that only he could satisfy.”
The other players absorb these words, and then write on their slips of paper what they imagine to be a credible first sentence for Ms. Lindsey’s novel. Essentially, they need to come up with something good — or bad — enough to fool the other players into thinking that this might be the book’s actual first sentence. Players initial their slips of paper and place them upside down in a pile at the center of the table.

Meanwhile the picker — the person who read the back cover aloud — writes the book’s actual first sentence on another slip of paper. He or she collects all the slips, mixing the real first sentence with the fakes, and commences to read each one aloud. Each person votes on what he or she thinks is the real first sentence. read more...

THE BOOK OF EVERYTHING by Guus Kuijer

2011-07-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

taken from Nine Kinds of Pie - Philip Nel's Blog

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Happy,” said Thomas. “When I grow up, I am going to be happy.”

Nine-year-old Thomas sees things that others don’t, like “tropical fish swimming in the canals,” thousands of frogs massing outside his house, and the loveliness of sixteen-year-old Eliza, who has “an artificial leg made of leather” and seems to understand him. Guus Kuijer’s The Book of Everything (2004, translated by John Nieuwenhuizen, 2006) is a brief, beautiful tale of Thomas losing faith, making friends with his sister and Mrs. van Amersfoort, gaining confidence in himself, and learning to resist his father’s bullying. The prose is lyrical, the images are magical realist, and the story is full of wisdom and humor. Here is a passage when Thomas, visiting Mrs. van Amersfoort, listens to Beethoven for the first time (the second sentence refers to her cat, who has been napping on a globe):

His ears started ringing again. The globe started spinning, cat and all. When he was about to draw Mrs. van Amersfoort’s attention to this, he saw that her heavy chair was floating above the floor like a low cloud. He barely had time to take this in when he felt the chair he was sitting in rising slowly, as if strong hands were lifting it. He wanted to shout with joy, but when he saw Mrs. van Amersfoort’s intent face, he realized that, with this music, it was normal for chairs to float. (19)

I love how this translates Thomas’s sense of wonder into a literal, physical experience. Kuijer does not tell us that Beethoven’s music makes them feel as if they were floating. Instead, they just float, borne upward in their chairs, drifting like low clouds. Beautiful.

The Book of Everything won the Flemish Golden Owl Award, but is not widely known in this country. It’s really, really good. I highly recommend it. I suspect that, once you read it, you’ll recommend it, too.

GARDEN BOOK/NURSERY SALE is on until July 3

2011-06-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

THE TROLLS by Polly Horvath

2011-06-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

taken from best-chilrens-book.com, review by Sarah Denslow

Meet storytelling Aunt Sally

The eccentric aunt: pretty much everyone has one (at least pretty much all fictional characters), and the Anderson kids are no exception.

Now that Aunt Sally is really coming to stay with them, though, (and not just stay, but actually take care of the kids while their parents are in Paris) Melissa, Amanda, and Pee Wee are about to find out just what this aunt, who sends them Christmas cards with a picture of a moose every year, is really like.

Melissa is ten, the oldest, and “always knows everything”; Amanda is eight and “often knows everything”; Pee Wee is six and “knows nothing” (at least in the estimation of his sisters. Pee Wee does, however, provide a good deal of comic relief prior to the arrival of Aunt Sally by continually wondering if the children will be sent to a kennel when their babysitter has to cancel, due to contracting a case of the bubonic plague.

Mom and Dad aren’t nuts about leaving Aunt Sally with the care of their three offspring, but they can’t find anyone else, and there are those non-refundable tickets to Paris to consider. Mom leaves a very detailed list of what the children need to do, including suggested vegetables for each day of the week, and then they’re off.

Aunt Sally proves to be both an interesting and loquacious adult. She ensures that the children will eat their green beans by eating her own with such gusto and creativity (including pantomiming knitting with two) that the children can hardly stand not to eat them and entertains them with stories of growing up in Vancouver.

The stories are wonderfully entertaining, if just a bit incredible, and include a hilarious story of Great-uncle Louis trying to get Aunt Sally’s brother to eat his vegetables by chasing him down with a handful of the things. But if his childhood in Canada was so wonderful, why, Melissa and Amanda to know, doesn’t their dad ever talk about Vancouver himself?

Well, says Aunt Sally, it might have something to do with the Trolls. What trolls? Aunt Sally says she’ll tell Melissa and Amanda, but they mustn’t let Pee Wee hear because he might get nightmares. read more....

Hug of the century

2011-06-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

This weekend June 25 & 26 - GARDEN BOOK SALE/NURSERY SALE

2011-06-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

STATE OF WONDER by Ann Patchett

2011-06-17T12:40:00.000-07:00

taken from Herald Scotland by Rosemary Goring

Marina Singh is a pharmacologist who spends 10 hours a day in a lab in Minnesota with her amiable colleague Anders.He is married with three sons. Marina, for her part, is in a relationship with the head of the company, Mr Fox. Nobody knows about their liaison, and Mr Fox, a widower nearly 20 years her senior, prefers it this way.

This is the background to the arrival of a letter that ignites Orange Prize-winning American novelist Patchett’s exhilarating if overheated work. Some weeks earlier, Anders had been sent to the Amazon to report on the work of a reclusive but brilliant doctor, Dr Swenson, who has spent decades studying a tribe whose womenfolk continue to bear children into their seventies. The company which employs Marina and Anders pays for her research, and is frustrated at the time it’s taking the doctor to produce results. Anders needs to find out why she is taking so long. The letter, however, contains dreadful news. It is from Dr Swenson, informing them Anders has died.

Marina is a homebody, attached to Minnesota, despite her Indian heritage, as if by chains. It is a measure of her fidelity to her friend and his grieving widow, and of her innate biddability that when Mr Fox asks her to go to Brazil and learn what happened, and how the uncommunicative doctor’s work is going, she agrees. What follows is a compellingly taut story in which a series of adventures containing vivid individuals throws up profound revelations.

Patchett is a highly empathetic writer, subtle in her characterisations and in her portrayal of strong attachments, unbidden feelings and the complications that attend both.

Marina emerges as a truly delightful and admirable heroine, a woman whose story one would like to follow beyond this book. As she investigates Anders’s death, she is obliged to confront her own past when, as a promising young doctor, she made a terrible mistake. That incident not only crippled her professionally but, it appears, emotionally too. This trauma is linked to Dr Swenson, which makes Marina’s trip doubly courageous.

One can’t but wonder, though, why a woman who willingly braves the Amazonian interior, with its cannibal tribes, its alphabet of snakes, spiders and insects, and a fanatical doctor, would have been so easily derailed in her earlier life.

The Amazonian forest is as unwelcoming as Dr Swenson: “At dusk the insects came down in a storm, the hard-shelled and soft-sided, the biting and stinging, the chirping and buzzing and droning, every last one unfolded its paper wings and flew with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses of the only three humans they could find.” Yet it is in the terrifying isolation of this wildly dangerous environment that Marina proves what she is made of.

Here, as in other novels, Patchett explores the nature of love and duty, and the huge responsibilities those small words carry. A pellucid, droll writer, she reveals her Tennessee upbringing in a penchant for drama that verges on the gothic. Where she fails to convince, for this reader at least, is in her portrait of the Amazon settlement. This setting, with its enigmatic tribe and their peculiar habits, gives rise to such extreme turns of event, it’s as if one has crossed a line from literary fiction into boy’s own territory. Added to which, the hinge on which Patchett’s plot turns is not hard to predict. This does not spoil one’s pleasure, but it diminishes the novel’s power. It is no small feat, then, for Patchett to surmount her over-egged plot to create a tender, affecting and memorable novel.

MY TATTOOED DAD by Daniel Nesquens & Magicomora

2011-06-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

taken from Last Gasp

A young boy describes what life is like when his dad comes home -- how he fries up chicken samosas for dinner, how he makes jokes and fools around, and how he carries him off to bed when he is sleepy. His dad also tells wonderful stories of his adventures in far-off lands, often inspired by his many, many exotic tattoos. His letters to his son are also full of great stories about the past -- what the first date with his mother was like (it included a visit to a fortune teller and a bizarre circus) and about how the boy's life was saved twice by this very same dad -- once when he was stolen from his baby basket by a dog and once when he flew out the car window. But as his mother says, his dad has ants in his pants, which means he's often not around. Still, life rolls along with one fantastical tale after another, in good times and bad. And this is this extraordinary father's gift to his child -- the life of the imagination -- which is always with him, even when his father is not. The illustrations have a nostalgic, underground graphic-novel style feel to them that perfectly complements the very original text. Ages 4-8.

Daniel Nesquens is a prolific, award-winning author who has written books for children and young adults, many of them available in either bilingual or Spanish editions in North America, including Caminando sobre el alambre, Como pez en el agua, D?as de Clase / School Days (Sopa de Libros / Soup of Books), Papa tenia un sombrero / Dad Had a Hat (Sopa De Libros / Soup of Books) and Mi familia / My Family. Several of his books have been listed in the White Ravens Catalogue and have been recognized by Venezuela's Banco del libro in "Los mejores libros para ni?os y j?venes" (the best books for children and youth). He lives in Zaragoza, Spain.

Magicomora is one of the most important pop surrealist artists in Spain and has exhibited his work all over the world. He is also a children's book illustrator with more than fifteen books to his credit. The Spanish edition of My Tattooed Dad was named best children's book by the Association of Illustrators of Catalonia. Magicomora lives in Barcelona, Spain.

TWELVE STEPS TOWARDS POLITICAL REVELATION by Walter Mosely

2011-06-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

taken from Perseus Academic

In his late teens and early twenties, Walter Mosley was addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. Drawing from this intimate knowledge of addiction and recovery, Mosley explores the deviances of contemporary America and describes a society in thrall to its own consumption. Although Americans live in the richest country on earth, many citizens exist on the brink of poverty, and from that profound economic inequality stems self-destructive behavior.

In Twelve Steps to Political Revelation, Mosley outlines a guide to recovery from oppression. First we must identify the problems that surround us. Next we must actively work together to create a just, more holistic society. And finally, power must be returned to the embrace of the people.

Challenging and original, Recovery confronts both self-understanding and how we define ourselves in relation to others.

About the Author

Walter Mosley is the author of more than thirty-four critically acclaimed books, including the bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. He is the winner of an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

THE DOGS OF ROME by Connor Fitzgerald

2011-06-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

taken from the San Francisco Book Review reviewed by Leslie Wolfson

A sloppy and seemingly random murder is committed in Rome, clearly the work of an amateur. But of course, things are more complicated than they appear. Upon closer inspection, the victim turns out to be an anti-dog- fighting crusader who has exposed an illegal ring run by a local gangster. What’s more, the victim’s wife is a politician, and his mistress is the daughter of a high-ranking Mafioso.

Alleva was dead, Massoni was dead, and Blume could hear exhilaration in Paolini’s tone. Revenge and reprieve all at once.

Enter Alec Blume, a police commissioner who is an American but has lived in Rome since his teens. Alec’s parents were murdered in a bank robbery gone bad, which gives him a cynical outlook on life. Blume is not your typical cop; he is sarcastic with co-workers and supervisors, he is overly zealous and far from suave when approaching women, and spends part of the book in a sling, awkwardly pursuing the bad guys when he should be home in bed. All of these traits make him a flawed but likable hero.

All of the players in the novel come across as completely believable, because the author avoids the stereotypical, and emphasizes the quirkiness in both large and small characters. The fast-moving plot has several interesting twists, and the tone is tongue-in-cheek. This is the first in a series of Commissario Blume novels, and anyone who reads this one will be looking forward to the next.

owl and cat playing together

2011-06-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER by Tom Franklin

2011-06-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

taken from Paste Magazine

The remarkable, painterly writer Susan Straight told me once that literary novelists are tiny rowboats next to the ocean liners of popular culture. “We’re rowing our leaky little skiffs like mad,” she said, “as we bail with a coffee can; and meanwhile there goes the giant Stephen King cruise ship or the James Patterson aircraft carrier, fully lit, the music playing, the passengers peering down at us from on high.”
So Tom Franklin just got a bigger boat.

Up until the latter part of the 20th century, literary fiction drove American book sales. Our great writers—Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Cather, Fitzgerald—were the engines of enterprise for the New York publishing houses, and the groundbreakers for the culture, too. A new book by one of the big modern American literary lions meant that a cultural event had occurred, and sales followed.

Now, many of our literary writers have largely been relegated to the commercial backwaters, with just a few exceptions like Jonathan Franzen; and the genre writers have become the big ships. Stieg Larsson, ahoy. Thrillers, mysteries, science fiction, uh huh, even romances—those are the novels that now displace the most commercial and cultural water. Whether this means a wholesale dumbing-down of our culture or a welcome relief from navel-gazing, nothing-happens-twit-lit—well, you decide. But what has occurred means something very serious for those wretched scribes among us who face the keyboard and the blank page every day—it means that most writers who want to both keep writing and continue eating now feel the compulsion to pen a genre novel that can become a series that builds an audience and a brand.

It used to be shocking when a literary giant came down from the mountaintop and wrote genre fiction, but now it’s commonplace. In his last two books, Cormac McCarthy, one of our greatest living authors, wrote a mystery (No Country for Old Men) and an apocalyptic science fiction novel (The Road) that both sold quite well, were optioned and produced handsomely by Hollywood and allowed McCarthy to finally buy the house his many previous literary novels had failed to provide, thank you.

Tom Franklin may be embarking on the same path. read more....

BANJO OF DESTINY by Cary Fagan, illustrated by Selçuk Demirel

2011-06-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

taken from Groundwood Books

Jeremiah Birnbaum is stinking rich. He lives in a house with nine bathrooms, a games room, an exercise room, an indoor pool, a hot tub, a movie theater, a bowling alley and a tennis court. His parents, a former hotdog vendor and window cleaner who made it big in dental floss, make sure Jeremiah goes to the very best private school, and that he takes lessons in all the things he will need to know how to do as an accomplished and impressive young man. Etiquette lessons, ballroom dancing, watercolor painting. And, of course, classical piano.

Jeremiah complies, because he wants to please his parents. But one day, by chance, he hears the captivating strains of a different kind of music -- the strums, plucks and rhythms of a banjo. It's music that stirs something in Jeremiah's dutiful little soul, and he is suddenly obsessed. And when his parents forbid him to play one, he decides to learn anyway -- even if he has to make the instrument himself.

"This bittersweet novel has just the right touch of wit and creativity to catch and keep the attention of young discerning readers. Thoroughly entwined into the novel is an unusual twist on the economics concept of wants versus needs that will encourage readers to think about what brings true happiness."
- Rutgers University Project on Economics and Children

"This is a touching and fresh story whose lightness and brevity will engage and empower young readers."
- Canadian Children's Book News

THE PRINCE OF MIST by Carlos Ruiz Zafron

2011-05-28T00:42:00.000-07:00

taken from independent.ie

In 2004, the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon earned international success and acclaim with his breakthrough novel The Shadow Of The Wind. His books have since sold over 15 million copies worldwide.

But before he wrote this bestselling debut novel for adults, he had already published four books in Spanish for younger readers. The first of these, The Prince Of Mist, has just been translated into English for the first time.

The Prince Of Mist is set in Spain during the Second World War and is the story of 13-year-old Max Carver and his family, who move from the city to the countryside to get away from the war.

But from the moment Max steps off the train, he has a creepy feeling about the seaside town. The clock in the old train station appears to be moving backwards and the house Max and his family move into has been boarded up for years because of its sad history. The overgrown garden is populated by stone statues that appear more lifelike than they should, and a secret stash of homemade films reveal even darker secrets. Then there is the malevolent cat who seems to be stalking the family.

When Max and his older sister Alicia meet a local boy, Roland, whose grandfather Victor Kray has run the lighthouse for 25 years, they discover the wreck of an old ship beneath the sea and the story of the prince of mist slowly begins to unravel. Soon Max discovers that the prince, a magician known only as Cain, is still in their midst and just waiting for his opportunity to settle an old score.

This first book by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is a chilling adventure and skips along at a fantastic pace. It's probably a little too scary for very young readers but older fans of Zafon's other work will certainly enjoy this novel.
All the familiar themes of his later books are here.

He writes fondly of father-and-son relationships, as well as of the importance of older male mentors to young men, along with the themes of coming of age, burgeoning romance, loss of innocence, and the ultimate battle of good versus evil.

Any young reader will enjoy The Prince Of Mist, but it is particularly enjoyable for fans of Zafon, as it gives an insight into the early ideas and preoccupations that eventually led to his most successful novel, The Shadow Of The Wind.

SWAN PEAK by James Lee Burke

2011-05-23T03:58:00.000-07:00

taken from The Guardian by Matthew Lewin

After the devastating events of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Cajun police detective Dave Robicheaux and his unpredictable ex-partner Clete Purcel have headed for the achingly beautiful landscape of the Bitterroot Valley in Montana to fish. But Burke cannot allow these two characters to exist in a peaceful world, and it's not long before they are embroiled in an investigation into the brutal killing of two young students a stone's throw from their holiday cabins. As always, Clete Purcel is a natural magnet for trouble, and it comes in increasingly powerful waves. Burke has cunningly woven a thread through the various loops in the plot, and when he begins to draw it all in, the compression raises the temperature to almost unbearable levels. The last 30 pages had me gripped with tension. This, together with Burke's ability to place you vicariously in the haunting landscapes he describes with such love and passion, again confirms his position as one of the finest American writers.

HOW THE SOLDIER REPAIRS THE GRAMOPHONE by Saša Stanišić

2011-05-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

taken from Book Forum by Ross Benjamin

Writers have long used a child’s perspective to relate fictional accounts of historical catastrophe, notably Günter Grass in The Tin Drum and Imre Kertész in Fatelessness. Bosnian-born German author Sasa Stanisic offers the latest installment in this tradition with his 2006 debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, a sensation in Germany, now skillfully translated by Anthea Bell. Through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old narrator, Aleksandar Krsmanovi, we witness a massacre perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs against their Muslim neighbors in the town of Višegrad in 1992. The outlines of the plot are autobiographical: The protagonist’s escape to Germany from the attack on Višegrad parallels the author’s own at the same age. But rather than rendering a direct account, Stanisic refracts these events through his young narrator’s wildly imaginative storytelling. A hyperactive fabulist, Aleksandar embarks on madcap flights of invention and comic exaggeration, which clash movingly with the painfully real chronicle of terror, loss, and exile at the story’s heart.

His tall tales contain many wonders: a magic wand that can “revolutionize all sorts of things, just so long as they’re in line with Tito’s ideas and the statutes of the Communist League of Yugoslavia”; a catfish wearing glasses; a river that talks and is ticklish. The headings that precede each chapter playfully mimic Cervantes and Grimmelshausen by providing brief, tantalizingly eccentric synopses: “How long a heart attack takes over a hundred meters, how heavy a spider’s life weighs, why a sad man writes to the cruel river, and what magic the comrade-in-chief of the unfinished can work.”

Aleksandar learns the answer to the first in this series of conundrums when his Grandpa Slavko suffers cardiac arrest in the same 9.86 seconds in which Carl Lewis breaks the world record for the hundred meters; the race is playing on Slavko’s television. Unwilling to accept his grandfather’s death, Aleksandar recalls Slavko’s gift to him of a magician’s hat and wand that “work magic exclusively along Party lines.” But even though he believes that the resurrec-tion of such a devoted Socialist would surely receive Tito’s blessing, he proves powerless to bring Slavko back to life. Defiantly proclaiming himself opposed to death and all endings, he resolves to become “Comrade-in-Chief of going on and on,” to think up stories that never end, and to draw pictures of unfinished things. His “unfinished” subjects are among the novelist’s idiosyncratic strokes: “plums without stones,” “Tito in a T-shirt,” “books with no dust on them.” read more....

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS by Donna Leon

2011-05-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

taken from italian-mysteries.com

"It's about a suspicious death that might be violent, might not be, that is, might be murder, might not be. Brunetti follows the trail and finds old people with secrets from long ago. It's not bad.
(© Donna Leon, August 13, 2010)

In the opening pages of a debut novel nearly two decades ago, a nasty conductor was poisoned during intermission at the famous La Fenice opera house in Venice. The Questura sent a man to investigate, and readers first met Commissario Guido Brunetti.

Since 1992’s Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon and her shrewd, sophisticated, and compassionate investigator have been delighting readers around the world. For her millions of fans, Leon’s novels have opened a window into the private Venice of her citizens, a world of incomparable beauty, family intimacy, shocking crime, and insidious corruption. This internationally acclaimed, best-selling series is widely considered one of the best ever written. Atlantic Monthly Press is thrilled to be publishing Drawing Conclusions, the 20th installment, in Spring 2011.

Late one night, Brunetti is suffering through a dinner with Vice Questore Patta and his nasty Lieutenant Scarpa when his telefonino rings. A old woman’s body has been found in a Spartan apartment on Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio. Her neighbor discovered it when she went to pick up her mail, after having been away in Palermo. Brunetti sees some signs of force on the old woman—the obvious wound on her head, what could be a bruise near her collarbone—but they could just as easily have been from the radiator near where she fell. When the medical examiner rules that the woman died of a heart attack, it seems there is nothing for Brunetti to investigate. But he can’t shake the feeling that something may have created conditions that led to her heart attack, that perhaps the woman was threatened.

Brunetti meets with the woman’s son, called into the city from the mainland to identify the body, her upstairs neighbor, and the nun in charge of the old age home where she volunteered. None of these quiet his suspicions. If anything, the son’s distraught, perhaps cagey behavior, a scene witnessed by the neighbor, and the nun’s reluctance to tell anything, as well as her comments about the deceased’s “terrible honesty,” only heighten Brunetti’s notion.

With the help of Inspector Lorenzo Vianello and the ever-resourceful Signorina Elettra Zorzi, perhaps Brunetti can get to the truth, and find some measure of justice.

Like the best of her beloved novels, Drawing Conclusions is insightful and emotionally powerful, and it reaffirms her status as one of the masters of literary crime fiction.
(© Atlantic Monthly Press)

THE JANUS STONE by Elly Griffiths

2011-05-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

taken from EURO CRIME

I have been really looking forward to this, the second in a series featuring Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist, based in East Anglia. The first book, THE CROSSING PLACES, was a delight and I have to say I wasn't disappointed with this one.

Ruth is called in when builders, demolishing an old house in Norwich, find the bones of a child beneath a doorway. The skull is missing, so is it a ritual sacrifice or just plain murder? DCI Harry Nelson needs to know. When it turns out that the house was once a children's home everyone begins to wonder what went on there. Nelson tracks down the priest who ran the home and finds that two children did go missing there years ago.

Harry and Ruth have to find out how old the bones are and trawl through the old files to find out who was involved in a crime that happened many years before. However it seems that not everyone wants the truth to come out and someone is trying to frighten Ruth off.

What a fantastic book this is. The characters of Ruth and Harry are so clear and believable. Ruth in particular is extremely engaging, full of self-doubt but battling on regardless. Harry is a most unusual fictional detective, not given to talking much, a man with a heart. I love the relationship between these two. But the secondary characters here are no stereotypes either, from the wonderful Cathbad to the saintly Father Hennessey all the supporting cast are finely drawn.

Plot-wise it will keep you guessing, and the use of present tense throughout means that the action is very immediate. You feel as though you're right there with them. The tension never falls and it builds to a fantastically gripping climax. This is a real tour-de-force and I just can't wait for more.

ON THE BLACK HILL By Bruce Chatwin

2011-05-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

taken from The New York Times

BRUCE CHATWIN'S highly praised travel book, ''In Patagonia'' (1977), established the writer as, among other things, a connoisseur of human oddity as it flourishes in isolation. His displaced Scottish sheep farmers and Welsh hymn singers, left stranded by the receding tide of economic colonialism, are depicted as turned in upon themselves, rendered queer by their desperate clinging - in the remote wastes of the Argentinian far-south - to obsolete modes and attitudes transplanted a century ago from ''Home.'' Even more bizarre are the descendants of Dom Francisco da Silva, a Brazilian slave trader, who - as Mr. Chatwin tells us in his semihistorical fantasy, ''The Viceroy of Ouidah'' (1980) -founded a mulatto dynasty in the bloodthirsty kingdom of Dahomey. In both works the human peculiarities are set against landscapes poetically evoked with exceptional vividness and exactitude.

The step from such nonfiction to Bruce Chatwin's first novel is not so great as might be imagined. ''On the Black Hill'' also chronicles the lives of odd folk living in relative isolation; it too paints a landscape which, as in the novels of Thomas Hardy, is at least as animate and moody as its inhabitants. But there the resemblance to Mr. Chatwin's earlier books ends. In its imaginative reach, ''On the Black Hill'' is very much a work of fiction. Nothing in Mr. Chatwin's previous work quite prepares us for the dramatic intensity with which scene after scene of the novel is brought to life. Despite the eccentricity of many of the characters, we soon realize that ''On the Black Hill'' belongs not to the literature of exoticism but to a valued, essentially British tradition that stretches back to the closing decades of the 18th century - a tradition of writing about homely, country things with an enraptured attention that causes them to glow with an almost visionary light. read more....

WHEN YOU REACH ME by Rebecca Stead

2011-05-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

taken from the guardian

The first thing I can say about this book is that I actually didn't know what it was about until right at the end. That definitely wasn't a bad thing though, as it kept me in suspense until the very last page. When You Reach Me has been one of those books, that even though they're fiction, and could probably never happen, the way its written was so believable. I felt like the main character, Miranda, was real, and that she was really writing this story from her own experience. I found that this book was one of the ones where it's almost like you forgot you're reading the book, but instead, living in the story.

The first part of the book I read was the blurb, and a couple of lines caught my eye:

And then a mysterious note arrives:

I am coming to save your friend's life, and my own.
I ask two favours. First, you must write me a letter.

Each message brings her closer to believing that only she can prevent a tragic death. Until the final note makes her think she's too late.

It was then I decided that I would not rest until I found out who the letter was from, why they sent it, and whether Miranda's friend survives. So, for the next few days, apart from school, I read the book through and through. Although, it's not a particularly thick book, the author still manages to cram so much in, and it all works. There are so many genres in it, like mystery, suspense and even a bit of science fiction. I've never really been a huge fan of science fiction books, but that didn't stop me from liking this book, as you don't even need to like any particular genre to fully appreciate how good this book is. I love the way that the reader gets to solve the mystery of the letters along with Miranda, and we're only able to figure it out when she does.

I thoroughly believe this book deserved its title of the Winner of the Newbery Medal 2010. Even though there were some points when I wasn't really sure what was going on, it was easy to pick up, and the ending really makes it worth it. I would recommend this book to young adults, as some parts are a little confusing, and especially to those who enjoy mysteries. The book also deals with many morals, and actually taught me some things I hadn't thought of before. When You Reach Me is a book full of twists and turns, and if you're looking for a book that will keep you on your toes the whole way through, this is definitely for you.

AN EVIL EYE by Jason Goodwin

2011-05-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

taken from the TURKISH FORUM review by Steve Donoghue

Raymond Chandler, who knew a thing or two about the fictional detective, famously wrote that he must be “the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” Consciously or not, Jason Goodwin has thoroughly absorbed that precept; his own fictional detective, Yashim, might have considered Philip Marlowe a bit uncouth (all that smoking and drinking surely show a lack of self-control), but they are cut from the same cloth when it comes to righting the wrongs of the world.

In “An Evil Eye,” Goodwin’s fourth novel, Yashim’s world is the decaying Ottoman Empire of the early 19th century. The year is 1839, and a new sultan, Abdulmecid, has replaced the old one in Istanbul. In the novel’s most atmospheric, least realized subplot, this change in monarchs occasions a corresponding change in the monarch’s harem. In an echo of Goodwin’s first book, “The Janissary Tree” (2006), the sultan’s harem also contains a mystery that will eventually involve our detective. But in “An Evil Eye,” the more immediate puzzle is posed by a dead body found on the island of Chalki in the well of the monastery. The dead man in the well is marked with a totenkopf — or skull symbol — and when Yashim is dispatched to investigate, it doesn’t take him long to surmise that the dead man might have been Russian.

Goodwin is an author of many strengths — the books in this series can be read independently of each other, and they just keep getting better — and the discovery of a Russian corpse in a Christian well in the heart of a Muslim land allows him to play to the best of those strengths: his remarkable ability to clarify the muddle of that decaying empire. “The Ottomans were not a nation [but] a caste, almost a family,” we learn. “Just as the sultan, as head of the family, maintained his pashas and his odalisques, so the Ottomans maintained their retinues in turn.” Yashim’s effort to restore some semblance of harmony to that family is made all the more complicated by the implication of Fevzi Ahmet Pasha, his old mentor in the service of the former sultan.

The complicated plot that unfolds is deftly controlled throughout, with dangers, chases, intrigues and frequent trips back to the harem. Goodwin’s prose is sharp and surprising (about that dead Russian we’re told, “His skin had wrinkled in the long immersion under water, soft and ridged like the white brains of sheep laid out for sale in the butcher’s market”), and the best part of the entertainment is none other than Yashim, a redoubtable, philosophical hero who finds himself in a dirty, battered world yet still holds out hope: “I think there is always a little gap somewhere, however hard you try to fit everything together. A small space, for something like grace, or mercy.”

There is precious little mercy in the cutthroat world Goodwin portrays here. Yashim is caught between the merciless cunning of his old teacher and the innocence of that teacher’s little daughter, between the politics of the sultanate and the equally twisted politics of the harem. The standout joy of these books is readers’ confidence that we’ve got the right hero, that the calm Yashim will prevail. “In the end,” he tells an exasperated colleague, “it isn’t about people, or sultans, or corruption. It’s about the truth.”

If there were only more such men, Chandler tells us, “the world would be a very safe place to live in.” And maybe the poor old Ottoman Empire would have lasted a bit longer if it had had more Yashims to call upon. As it is, we must hope the original has many, many more adventures.

THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY by Heidi W. Durrow

2011-05-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

taken from HEIDIWDURROW.COM

"[A] breathless telling of a tale we've never heard before. Haunting and lovely, pitch-perfect, this book could not be more timely."-Barbara Kingsolver

Chosen by Barbara Kingsolver as the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky has garnered rave reviews since its February 2010 publication. The Washington Post calls it "an auspicious debut" and named it one of the Best Novels of 2010. The Miami Herald says: "Durrow's powerful novel is poised to take a place among classics of the American experience." The Oregonian hails it as a Top 10 Book of 2010. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is already a book club favorite, a New York Times Bestseller, a LA Times Bestseller List, an Indie Next Pick, a Pennie's Pick at Costco, and is now in its 5th printing in paperback.

This debut novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I. who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy.

With her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring mixed attention her way. Growing up in the 1980s, she learns to swallow her overwhelming grief and confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

Meanwhile, a mystery unfolds, revealing the terrible truth about Rachel's last morning on a Chicago rooftop. Interwoven are the voices of Jamie, a neighborhood boy who witnessed the events, and Laronne, a friend of Rachel's mother. Inspired by a true story of a mother's twisted love, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky reveals an unfathomable past and explores issues of identity at a time when many people are asking "Must race confine us and define us?"

In the tradition of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John,Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street, here is a portrait of a young girl—and society's ideas of race, class, and beauty.

WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON by Grace Lin

2011-05-08T17:22:00.000-07:00

taken from Sarah Tuttle's blog by Sarah Tuttle

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Massachusetts author Grace Lin, follows a young Chinese girl on a quest to find good fortune for her family. Minli leaves home on the instructions of a talking goldfish to find the Old Man of the Moon, who she hopes will give her the information she needs to make her family happy and prosperous. In the course of her quest, Minli comes across magical creatures and characters right out of legends, including a flightless dragon and a village where the sky rains seeds.

Lin’s enchanting storytelling voice gives Where the Mountain Meets the Moon the feel of a classic fantasy tale. While Minli’s journey follows a the quest format of traditional fantasy writing, Lin adds her own twist by telling “stories within the story.” She alternates chapters on Minli with chapters of folktales that are told by characters that Minli meets. Lin weaves the folktales into Minli’s own quest, adding layers of plot and tension. The text of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is enhanced by Lin’s paintings and the monochromatic illustrations at the start of each chapter.

As someone who adores folktales and classic fantasy stories, I am perhaps predisposed to love Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. However, I’m not the only one gushing about how wonderful it is! Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a Newbery Honor Book for 2010, and has become a best seller. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I hope you will.

TAIL OF BLUE BIRD by Nii Ayikwei

2011-05-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

taken from THE INDEPENDENT reviewed by Jonathan Gibbs

Here is a delightful book that combines the basic tug of the whodunnit with the more elegant pleasures of the literary novel. Like the best detective stories, it has a questing hero, and a vivid sense of locale. Kayo Odamtten is a young Ghanaian returned home after studying in the UK. He is happy enough working as a forensic pathologist in Accra. But when a strange crime is discovered in a remote forest village – by the horrified girlfriend of the Transport Minister, no less – Kayo is dragged into the investigation by corrupt police Inspector PJ Donker, whose idea of recruitment is the threat of imprisonment on conspiracy charges.

Insp. Donker sends Kayo off with the warning, "Don't return until you have a good scientific theory and report – CSI-style." Kayo finds the "evil" evidence: unidentified fleshy remains, crawling with maggots, in the corner of a hut belonging to a cocoa farmer who hasn't been seen for a month. He does his CSI best – taking samples for DNA testing, using hi-tech "blue merge" goggles to spot patches of urine on the floor, creating a digital model of the crime scene on his laptop. More importantly, he listens to the locals, especially the old hunter Opanyin Poku.

The hunter shares some of the book's narrative, giving Kayo clues in the form of rambling tales of village history as they sit around drinking palm wine laced with the medicine man's own potions. Kayo may be "caught in a void between instinct and knowledge", but his courtesy and respect for non-Western wisdom mean that there is no real danger of his not getting to the bottom of the mystery.

Tail of the Blue Bird is not overly ambitious, but everything it sets out to do, it does admirably. Nii Ayikwei Parkes surely knows the effect the Ghanaian dialogue will have; he doesn't translate or explain, and this additional layer of mystery (for the average British reader) only adds to the strength of its lyricism and insight.

EVERY LAST ONE by Anna Quindlen

2011-04-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

taken from the NEW YORK TIMES, by MAGGIE SCARF

If it’s true that traits like novelty-seeking and risk-aversion are genetic in origin, then Mary Beth Latham’s biological makeup appears to be tilted toward safety and security. Mary Beth, the narrator of Anna Quindlen’s engrossing new novel, “Every Last One,” values stability and sameness, finding quiet contentment in her long, amiable marriage to an ophthalmologist and in her flourishing career as a landscaper. But her most intense feelings and greatest concerns are centered on her three teenage children: lovely Ruby, nearing her last year of high school, and the twins, Max and Alex, who will be freshmen next year.

The Lathams’ busy, welcoming household, a study in domestic tranquility, is a magnet for friends of all ages. But there are curious ripples beneath this happy surface. Does the fact that Ruby has teetered on the edge of anorexia have mostly to do with normal growing pains or is there something darker, more troublesome to blame? And what about Ruby’s increasing wish to free herself from a cloying romance with her childhood playmate and high school sweetheart, who seems to be a constant presence in the Latham household? As for the twins, they’re a study in yin and yang. Alex is outgoing, comfortable in his own skin, on his way to making the high school soccer team; Max (called Max the Mute by his classmates) is clumsy and rarely speaks.

It seems unlikely that violence could erupt in the peaceful, countrified New England town where the Lathams live. Yet early in the novel one of Mary Beth’s large landscaping jobs (“six tiers of shrubs, a small copse of flowering plum and pear, a long hedge of weigela”) is vandalized, the plantings uprooted and carried off overnight. “I don’t mean to sound hysterical, but I am really freaked out by this,” she tells the policeman who arrives to inspect the damage. read more...

THE HUNGRY GHOSTS by Anne Berry

2011-04-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

taken from the GLOBE AND MAIL by Christy Ann Conlin

Anne Berry's The Hungry Ghosts is a stunning debut, brilliant in the seamless intricacy of a story that plays out over a 60-year period, beginning with the brutal Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. Epic in scope and voice, the book moves from British Hong Kong to England and Paris, returning to post-colonial Hong Kong, now a part of the People's Republic of China.

This book is so skillfully crafted, and the writing so elegant, it's hard to believe it is a first novel. Some years ago, critic Noah Richler railed against young new writers emerging from creative writing programs, the product of too many writing workshops and not enough real-life experience. Anne Berry is his dream. Berry, 54, was born in Hong Kong to a former key figure in the colonial government. She ran an acting school and wrote plays, in addition to working as a speech therapist and a reporter. Now living in England, Berry writes full time and has already finished a second novel. Her diverse background and experience are perhaps the perfect companions to the talent and insight that have created this page-turning book.

The story centres on two characters, 12-year-old Alice Safford, the eccentric third daughter of a high-ranking official in the British colonial government in Hong Kong, and the restless spirit of Lin Shui, a young girl raped and murdered by a Japanese solider in 1942. Lin Shui lingers in a netherworld between the living and the dead, haunting a morgue in an abandoned British army hospital.

When the hospital is reborn as a private school for the children of colonial officials, Lin Shui attaches herself to young Alice, a deeply troubled child existing in the quintessential English colonial world of stiff upper lips, carefully controlled façades and undercurrents of deceit and betrayal. read more....

2011-04-27T16:56:00.000-07:00

You have reached the end of the internet.

PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA by Peter Carey

2011-04-26T07:07:00.000-07:00

taken from SALON.COM by Laura Miller

Peter Carey's delightful new novel asks whether democracy and art are incompatible

Although he's won the Booker Prize twice (for "Oscar and Lucinda" and "True History of the Kelly Gang"), Peter Carey doesn't quite match the American notion of a great novelist; for one thing, his books are too much fun. (Tellingly, the least comic products of his pen tend to be the most celebrated.) Shouldn't literature taste more medicinal — like, say, the works of that other double Booker winner, J.M. Coetzee? Also, Carey has mostly written about Australia (both the country and the state of mind), which Americans find perplexing. We regard Australia as too much like America to be interestingly foreign, so why harp on it? Why not just act as if you're already American? It works for half the movie stars in Hollywood, after all.

So while Carey has lived in New York for two decades, he still feels like a Commonwealth novelist, the kind of writer who consistently produces a satisfying, well-shaped, inventive and entertaining book every two or three years without excessive fuss or bother. This is not how we do it stateside. To read any novel more challenging than an airport thriller, Americans usually need to be persuaded that the book is epochal, the result of a heroic effort to define our times, undertaken by a stormy and (ideally) clinically depressed genius. We figure that if we have to exert ourselves to read it, we want a guaranteed pay-off in cultural capital. read more....

SAVAGES by Don Winslow

2011-04-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

taken from POWELL'S BOOKS

A breakthrough novel that pits young kingpins against a Mexican drug cartel, Savages is a provocative, sexy, and sharply funny thrill ride through the dark side of the war on drugs and beyond.

Part-time environmentalist and philanthropist Ben and his ex-mercenary buddy Chon run a Laguna Beach–based marijuana operation, reaping significant profits from their loyal clientele. In the past when their turf was challenged, Chon took care of eliminating the threat. But now they may have come up against something that they cant handlethe Mexican Baja Cartel wants in, and sends them the message that a "no" is unacceptable. When they refuse to back down, the cartel escalates its threat, kidnapping Ophelia, the boys playmate and confidante. Os abduction sets off a dizzying array of ingenious negotiations and gripping plot twists that will captivate readers eager to learn the costs of freedom and the price of one amazing high.

Following "the best summertime crime novel ever" (San Francisco Chronicle on The Dawn Patrol), bestselling author Winslow offers up a smash hit in the making. Savages is an ingenious combination of adrenaline-fueled suspense and true-crime reportage by a master thriller writer at the very top of his game.

Review:

"Spare, clipped expository prose and hip, spot-on dialogue propel this visceral crime novel from Winslow (The Dawn Patrol). The future is looking good for Laguna Beach, Calif., marijuana growers Ben and Chon, until they receive an ominous e-mail from the Baja Cartel. Attached is a photograph showing the decapitated bodies of other independent drug dealers. The message is clear: sell your product through us or else. Ben and Chon try to resist, but matters escalate after cartel thugs abduct Ophelia, the guys' beautiful young playmate and accomplice, and hold her for a cool million ransom. Meanwhile, Elena 'La Reina' Sanchez Lauter, the leader of the Baja Cartel, must deal with rival drug gangs and potential overthrow from within. Ben and Chon propose a trade that Elena can't refuse, setting the stage for the violent and utterly satisfying ending. Winslow's encyclopedic knowledge of the border drug trade lends authenticity. (July)" Publishers Weekly

The Power of Words

2011-04-20T17:05:00.001-07:00

THE WINTER THIEF by Jenny White

2011-04-19T04:50:00.000-07:00

taken from JENNYWHITE.NET

December 1888. Vera Arti carries The Communist Manifesto in Armenian through Istanbul’s streets, unaware of the men following her. The police discover a shipload of guns and the Imperial Ottoman Bank is blown up. Suspicion falls on a socialist commune Arti’s friends organized in the eastern mountains. Investigating, Special Prosecutor Kamil Pasha encounters a ruthless adversary, Vahid, the head of a special branch of the secret police. Vahid has convinced the Sultan that the commune is leading an Armenian secessionist movement and should be destroyed, along with surrounding villages. Kamil must stop the massacre, but finds himself on the wrong side of the law, framed for murder and accused of treason. His family and the woman he loves are threatened. Exploring the dark obsessions of the most powerful and dangerous men of the dying Ottoman Empire, The Winter Thief also reflects the mad idealism of these turbulent times.

Patrick Ness's top 10 'unsuitable' books for teenagers

2011-04-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

taken from THE GUARDIAN

Patrick Ness was born and grew up in the US, and moved to London in 1999, where he's lived ever since. He's written two books for adults (a novel called The Crash of Hennington and a short story collection called Topics About Which I Know Nothing), and published The Knife of Never Letting Go, his first young adult book, in 2008. It won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. The sequel, The Ask and the Answer, won the Costa children's fiction prize, and the final book in the trilogy, Monsters of Men, came out last year. His new novel, A Monster Calls, will be published next month.

"My childhood reading was blissfully unchaperoned. My parents were just happy I liked to read, and so I – in utter innocence – would wander into the public library and pick up any old thing. I read Harold Robbins' Celebrity when I was 13, for example. It was VERY educational.

"I survived, though. When I asked on Twitter for other "inappropriate" books people had read way too young, the list included Jilly Cooper, Irvine Welsh, Flowers in the Attic (by practically everyone) and lots and lots of Stephen King. All bookish young readers over-reach occasionally, and if they discover they like it, they keep on doing it. What a great way to establish reading as exciting and maybe even dangerous, eh?

"But there's more to adult books than adult material. There are a number of books that are actually rather better if read when you're a teen, some because they're entertaining contraband, some because it can never be too early to read something so wonderful, and some because, if you wait, you might have missed your chance forever."

1. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

The obvious first choice, but not necessarily because of its literary reputation. It needs to be read when you're young. If you first meet Holden Caulfield when you're too old, the desire to give him a good slap might impede your enjoyment.

2. The Stand by Stephen King

For his sheer ability to get teenagers to love reading, Stephen King is a saint. I did a book report on Pet Sematary in 8th grade. My English teacher, bless her forever, gave me an A. I pick The Stand because if you're an adult, it's a bit long. If you're a teenager, it's War and Peace. Scratch that, if you're a teenager, it's better. And that's no bad thing.

3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Speaking of 1000+ page books, Infinite Jest is filled with all the things that are brilliant to read when you're young: unembarrassed cleverness, a cheeky take on the future, hilarious experiments with form, and a serious sense of accomplishment when you're finished.

4. Beloved by Toni Morrison

I read Beloved when I was 15, and it felt like the first time being allowed to sit at the grown-up's table. I may not have followed every word, but I was mesmerised. And I learned without even knowing I was being taught.

5. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

One of those literary, award-winning adult novels that I secretly think was written for teens all along (see To Kill A Mockingbird). No, it won't encourage suicide, but it will encourage an appreciation for elegant writing and ring true for how isolating the teenage years can feel. Plus, it's in third person plural! What's not to love?

6. Dracula by Bram Stoker

Next, a couple of classics that are better in your teens. Dracula first because it's still fast-paced, scary and appealingly pervy. Plus, it's important to know that vampires don't play baseball. And honestly? They never would.

7. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Because Middlemarch should be read when you're 14. And again when you're 23. And again at 31. And 45. And 52. And 68. And 84. It will, astoundingly, be a different book every time.

8. Maul by Tricia Sullivan

Two personal choices now. Read Tricia Sullivan's fantastic, profane and mind-bending Maul mainly because it's very important to start loving brilliant genre fiction before older readers can tell you to be a snob about it. Plus, far-future gender politics and teenagers with machine guns in a shopping mall. I ask again, what's not to love?

9. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Tom, not Harold. This book is the whole reason for this list. I read it probably a dozen times from ages 15 to 17, and was amazed to discover that fiction could be, of all things, playful. That it didn't always need to be polite. That it could have runaway metaphors just for a laugh. And that the naughty bits could be told with a smile. It opened my eyes to a world of possibilities in my own writing, and is probably the most formative book I ever read. And you know what? I haven't read it since. I can't bear to. Seen through the eyes of my adult self, who knows how disappointed I'd be? Let it remain forever, gloriously, in my teenage years.

10. Unrecommended by Unnamed

And here's where it gets tricky. I can't possibly recommend some of the books that I and others read when we were teenagers. I mean, really, is Trainspotting in any way appropriate for a teenager? And what about the Jilly Coopers and the Jackie Collinses and, heaven help us, Flowers in the Attic? We older folks may have cherished, er, survived reading them at your age, but you're too young, WAY too young, to read any of these books that are easily available at your local library. Listed alphabetically by author. So the Cs would be near the front and Ws near the back. But I couldn't possibly recommend that.

TRUTH by Peter Temple

2011-04-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

taken from CRIMESPACE

At the close of a long day, Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment high above the city. In the glass bath, a young woman lies dead.

Villani's job as head of the Victoria Police Homicide Squad is bathed in blood and sorrow. His life is his work. It is his identity, his calling, his touchstone. But now, over a few sweltering summer days, as fires burn across the state and his superiors and colleagues scheme and jostle, he finds all the certainties of his life are crumbling. read more....

VILLIAGE OF THE GHOST BEARS by Stan Jones

2011-04-15T23:40:00.000-07:00

taken from MYSTERIOUS REVIEWS

Inupiaq Alaskan State Trooper Nathan Active investigates a mysterious fire while separately seeking to identify a dead body found washed ashore on a nearby lake in Village of the Ghost Bears, the fourth mystery in this series by Stan Jones.

Active and his longtime love Grace are just beginning a camping trip along the shores of One-Way Lake when they stumble upon the body of a man whose face has been eaten away by local pike. But before they can arrange to have the body recovered, Active is called to the small town of Chukchi, a coastal village in northwest Alaska, where a recreation center has burned down, killing eight people who were trapped inside when the exit doors were wired shut. The motive for arson isn't obvious, nor is one for murder ... if one of the dead was the intended target. Then there's still that unknown man at One-Way Lake. Almost certainly an accidental death from a fall, but until the body can be recovered and identified it remains another mystery for Active to solve. read more...

SNOW ANGELS by James Thompson

2011-04-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

taken from MATERIAL WITNESS

Finland has been notably under-represented in the surge of Nordic crime fiction that has take the genre by storm in recent years. While Icelanders, Swedes and Norwegians have risen to prominence few Finnish authors have broken into international markets.

This has been a personal disappointment to me. Having spent a lot of time in Finland, and grown to like it and the Finns very much, I have long been waiting for a writer to bring the country to life on the crime scene.

So it was with the greatest of pleasure that I discovered James Thompson and his debut novel Snow Angels, set in FInnish lapland during Kaamos, the bleak, black Polar midwinter during which the sun does not rise at all for several days.

It is a good starting place and time for a writer exploring Finland and taking it to a new audience. Light and heat are perhaps the two most dominant characteristics of the country to a newcomer: in the winter there is an alarming lack of both - even in southern parts such as Helsinki; in the summer there is a surfeit of the latter. It is impossible not to wonder what impact the long dark winters has on those living here.

Thompson, a long-term resident, sets his story up handsomely to examine this question and others about the Finns, and Snow Angels, which is essentially a terrific mystery novel, explores some of these themes primarily through the dynamic between the central character, police detective Kari Vaara, and his American wife Kate, who is enduring her first Finnish winter as a manager in the Arctic ski resort of Levi. Vaara sees the Finns as they see themselves, while Kate provides the outsiders view. read more....

A VERY PRIVATE MURDER by Stuart Pawson

2011-04-11T22:27:00.000-07:00

taken from Meanstreets

Charlie Priest is on gardening leave - the neighbours have complained about his weeds – when the call comes. Ghislaine Curzon, girlfriend of one of the royal princes, is in Heckley to open the Curzon Centre, a new shopping mall and conference facility. But as she reveals the commemorative plaque at the opening ceremony it looks like someone has got to it first, defacing it with a single obscene word in foot-high red letters. The visiting dignitaries are aghast, and the chief constable insists on Charlie investigating the case.

Charlie would rather be investigating the burglaries perpetrated by a two-man gang armed with a pit bull terrier, but he welcomes the opportunity to meet Ghislaine at the family’s stately home in East Yorkshire. The jollities cease, however, when the mayor of Heckley is found dead.

The subsequent investigation involves Charlie visiting the mayor’s diminutive, flute-playing wife; the manageress of the mall and her anarchist student son; a half blind jockey and a cornucopia of characters from the rich farmland of East Yorkshire. It’s going to take more than standard police procedure to crack this case.

THE TROUBLED MAN by Henning Mankell

2011-04-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

taken from THE GUARDIAN

That's it then; the end. Twenty-two years after his first appearance and more than a decade since the one everybody - even his creator - had assumed would be his last, Inspector Kurt Wallander is working his last case.

The lugubrious, all too human but ultimately decent Swedish cop with the never-ending health problems and the terrible family life has sold 30m books in 45 different languages. This will be a sad day for a lot of people.

But not, on balance, for Henning Mankell. "Hand on heart," he says, "I thought I'd written his last adventure a long time ago. I don't even particularly like the man. We have certain things in common: we enjoy the same kind of music, we have a similarly conscientious approach to work. We wouldn't be enemies if we knew each other, but he wouldn't be a close friend. He's not someone I'd invite to dinner."

We're in the sunlit kitchen of the house Mankell owns with his wife Eva in old Antibes, in the south of France. Coffee and cakes from the local patisserie are on the table. Eva, a successful theatre director in Sweden and daughter of Ingmar Bergman, disappears upstairs to work. Mankell, rumpled and relaxed in T-shirt and black tracksuit of uncertain vintage and indiscriminate design, listens gravely and answers precisely. The Troubled Man, his 10th and final Wallander novel, is published here this week. read more....

IT'S A BOOK written & illustrated by Lane Smith

2011-04-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

taken from Powell's Books

Playful and lighthearted with a subversive twist that is signature Lane Smith, It's a Book is a delightful manifesto on behalf of print in the digital age. This satisfying, perfectly executed picture book has something to say to readers of all stripes and all ages.

The perfect gift for the tech-weary child (or adult) in your life. Bold illustrations, simple text, and a barrelful of wit will remind readers of the joys to be found when you go offline and lose yourself in the pages of a favorite story. Recommended by Billie Bloebaum, Powell's Books at PDX

new fairly traded hand made baskets in stock

2011-04-09T17:51:00.001-07:00

Red Telegraph

Red Telegraph sources fairly traded products made by women in developing countries. We work with organisations that are committed to breaking the cycle of poverty by training and employing the most disadvantaged women in their regions. By buying one of our products you are helping to support their efforts to establish poverty-free societies across the world.

A NOVEL BOOKSTORE by Laurence Cossé

2011-04-06T18:28:00.000-07:00

taken from WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS by Emma Hamilton

A new bookstore opens in Paris and stirs up a culture war. Ivan, a career bookseller and Francesca, a socialite and passionate reader, decide to open an "ideal bookstore"—one in which only good books are sold. They call it simply "The Good Novel." And before long, the place experiences phenomenal sales as well as violent threats, all the while receiving massive press coverage—by turns, adulatory and vituperative.

In an age of plummeting book sales, daily hardship (and ruin) for independent bookstores, and a publishing industry whose future seems grim, the plot of A Novel Bookstore could only be the fantasy of an undeterred bibliophile. In this alternate universe, books are at the forefront of cultural consciousness and debate. Even in France, a country more protective of its high culture than our own, the situation is only slightly more plausible. For all its utopian indulgences, the novel does turn on a familiar, and emblematic, tension. The escalating war over the bookstore has, at its heart, a clash between "literature" and the business of publishing. Of course, literature is a loaded category. Nabokov (whose entire oeuvre is sold at the store) once wrote that "reality" was one of the few words that means nothing without quotation marks. I'd hazard that "literature" is another. For what is literature except books that have been deemed, by someone, good and important? READ MORE....

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE COMPOSER AND HIS JUDGE by Patricia Duncker

2011-04-05T02:43:00.000-07:00

taken from THE TELEGRAPH by Jake Kerridge

The story of the Heaven’s Gate group, 39 of whose members killed themselves in California in 1997 in the belief that this would allow their souls to board an alien spaceship, is recommended reading for anybody who thinks that the premise of Patricia Duncker’s new novel is too outlandish. It concerns an outbreak of suicides among the Swiss members of a cult who worship an astral body in the constellation Auriga they call the Dark Host and believe to be a herald of the Apocalypse.

But there is a twist in Duncker’s tale. The cult members are not the usual saddos but Switzerland’s scientific and artistic elite, including its chief global- warming adviser and best-known television astronomer; to appreciate the effect this has, we have to imagine Nicholas Stern, Patrick Moore and the whole of the Royal Society jumping off the roof of the Greenwich Observatory.

The novel begins with the discovery in a forest in the Jura of the corpses of 16 people, arranged in a semicircle. André Schweigen, a petulant French cop, notes similarities to a mass suicide in Switzerland some years earlier and summons his colleague and lover, Dominique Carpentier, a judge known as “la chasseuse de sectes”, the cult hunter. She is a rational thinker who tracks down the ageing smoothies who set up bogus sects in order to fleece the gullible. READ MORE....

An Author's View - Margaret Atwood

2011-04-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

“Publishing” originally meant simply to make public. That meaning, and the processes and technologies by which “publishing” has taken place, has changed radically over the years, and is in the process of changing yet again. The pie—the author and work, and the packaging and sale of the latter—has been divided up in various ways through the years, with bigger and smaller pieces for accordingly. We are now in the midst of the largest publishing changes and challenges since Gutenberg. How will they affect the author? What tools are newly available to him/her? One author’s view, illustrated with her own drawings.

Artist Jack Dylan

2011-03-30T05:40:00.000-07:00

Illustration for The Walrus, a piece on Canadian crime fiction, by Jack Dylan.

THREE CLASSIC CHILDREN'S STORIES drawings by Edward Gorey

2011-03-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

taken from GOREOGRAPHY.COM

Edward Gorey was a very busy body in 1972 and 1973. He published fourteen new works – nine are considered primary works, including The Awdrey-Gore Legacy, and five secondary works, all containing several pages of artwork. This Summer, PomegranateKids, an imprint of Pomegranate Communications, reintroduces three titles from this time period, bundled together into one. Titled Three Classic Children’s Stories, this hardcover volume contains Little Red Riding Hood (1972), Jack the Giant Killer (1973) and Rumpelstiltskin (1973). This isn’t a simple re-issue, it contains changes that will interest both new and seasoned Gorey readers. For a start, all three stories are rewritten, retold by James Donnelly. For another, the illustrations wear new colors.

Actually, the re-coloring of Rumpelstiltskin is more a resurrection. The dust jacket artwork for the original 1973 Rumplestiltskin was finished in watercolor, while the story’s illustrations remained black and a marigold-yellow. This time, Pomegranate’s artists gave Rumplestiltskin a makeover, guided by Gorey’s palette from the original jacket art. It’s very well done. Jack the Giant Killer on the other hand, is practically a new work. The original’s black and tangerine palette makes Jack’s costume change welcome. Red Riding Hood’s red cloak is still as red as red can be, with only the subtlest addition of new tints. All in all, the artwork throughout is nicely uplifted by the changes. At the same time, while the old original two-color press runs were done mostly out of cost considerations, you could argue the old illustrations were intentionally minimalist, or maybe convey an unintentionally comic touch. But again, the new colorizing effort is engaging, and follows Gorey’s esthetic.

James Donnelly merrily undertakes the retelling of these classic stories, after writing for Pomegranate on projects with the British Museum, Oxford University Press USA, and the National Gallery of Art. Donnelly writes actively, directly to the reader. At times a little fresh, with unexpected nods to Gorey’s influence placed here and there. The original Red Riding Hood was written by Schenk de Regniers, Jack the Giant Killer by an anonymous writer, and were both presented in verse. The original Rumplestiltskin was written by Edith Tarcov, voiced in a teacher-ly, fairytale-manner. They were all very charming collaborations. This time, all three stories follow a more modern narrative, Donnelly’s storytelling bringing these old tales to the present. I enjoyed jumping between old and new versions of all three stories, for they’re all completely different creatures, with different affects. Three Classic Children’s Stories is a real treat, and worth a place in the kids’ library, classroom and Gorey collection. It’s new, elegant and refreshing – a great way to bring some of Gorey’s lesser-known collaborations to the fore.

Banned books return to shelves in Egypt and Tunisia

2011-03-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

taken from THE GUARDIAN by Benedicte Page

Old books market in Cairo. Photograph: Alamy

A number of highly political titles censored by the regime of ousted Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali are now returning to the country's bookshop shelves.

La Regente de Carthage by Nicolas Beau and Catherine Graciet, a critical book about the former president's family, focusing in particular on the role of his wife, Leila, is among those now openly on sale in the country, according to the International Publishers Association.

Alongside it is a previously banned study of the long-serving Tunisian president from whom Ben Ali took over following a 1987 coup: Habib Bourguiba: La Trace et l'Heritage by Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser.
Also now appearing in the country's bookshops are The Assassination of Salah Ben Youssef by Omar Khlifi, a book about the shooting of a former Tunisian minister of justice in Frankfurt in 1961, and works by journalist Toaufik Ben Brik, a prominent critic of Ben Ali's presidency.

Alexis Krikorian, director of the Freedom to Publish programme at the IPA, said the emergence of these and other formerly banned books within Tunisia was "very good news". Whether censorship still existed with regard to new titles was a separate issue, he added, but it was likely that the legal submission procedure, which under the old regime had been misused to block books at their printers, "no longer applies".
Anecdotal reports are also emerging of once suppressed titles appearing for impromptu sale on street corners and newspaper kiosks across Egypt. Salwa Gaspard of joint English/Arabic language publisher Saqi Books said accounts in the Arabic press told of books that had been hidden for years in private basements now once more seeing the light of day.

Cairo is also to hold a book fair in Tahrir Square – the focus for protests against former president Hosni Mubarak – at the end of March, according to Trevor Naylor of the American University of Cairo Press bookshop, which is based in the square. Naylor told the Bookseller that the event had been planned in the wake of the cancelled Cairo Book Fair, which was abandoned in January in the face of growing political unrest.

"Everyone around the globe now associates Tahrir Square with freedom and revolution," Naylor said. "We really wanted to do something that celebrates what happened here, and this seems like a great way to do it."

THE NATURAL LAWS OF GOOD LUCK by Ellen Graf

2011-03-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

taken from FRIENDS OF BOOKS

Ellen is forty-six, divorced, and having no luck with personal ads when her Chinese girlfriend comes up with a plan: she has a brother in China, Zhong-hua, who’s lonely too. Maybe they’d like each other? Taking a leap of faith that most of us wouldn’t dare, Ellen travels to China to meet him. Though they speak only a few words of each other’s language, there’s an unspoken connection between them and they decide to marry. What follows is a remarkably touching and humorous story of two people from completely different worlds trying to make a marriage work. Settling in at Ellen’s ramshackle farmhouse in upstate New York, they quickly discover the cultural chasm that lies between them. Ellen and her teenage daughter decide to adopt a policy of nonjudgment as Zhong-hua lobbies to sell their refrigerator (“Just three people, no need”), serves them giant sea slugs for dinner, and brusquely nudges Ellen aside without an “excuse me” (“Family no need these kind of words”). Zhong-hua is not the type to offer his wife impromptu smiles or hugs, but in bed at night he holds her tightly like she’s “something long lost and precious that might not live until morning.” The Natural Laws of Good Luck is an unusual and exquisitely written love story—one that will resonate with anyone who has ever contemplated with wonder the spaces that exist between us and those we care about.

The Bricks-and-Mortar Bookstore: Last Bastion of Privacy?

2011-03-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

taken from PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

I have a friend — let’s call her “me” — who recently became interested in an unconventional topic. (Lest your curiosity lead you in bizarre directions, let me assure you that no weapons dealing or illegal activity of any kind were involved.) In researching books I might want to read, I quickly realized how little privacy is left to the modern-day consumer.

While I, as a bookseller, have the luxury of ordering books from distributors and making purchases in relative privacy, my customers must choose between online book ordering — which seems anonymous but in fact leaves quite an information trail — and in-store purchasing, which—while it involves face-to-face interaction with the cashier— is also the only method left to buy a book anonymously.

Think about it. Anyone can come into The Flying Pig, or another store, plunk down some cash, and leave with a book no one can or will trace. Nor will that purchase generate recommendation lists that pop up whenever the customer—or his wife, or children—logs on to the website. No one at the bookstore will sell that information to marketers in order for them to build profiles of customer preferences, spending habits and abilities. No one will violate that reader’s freedom to read, or his privacy.

That is no small wonder in this day and age when every street corner has a surveillance camera, and every online click garners a cookie. READ MORE.....

HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE: AND HOW TO READ ONE by Stanley Fish

2011-03-14T04:55:00.000-07:00

taken from THAT SHAKESPEAREAN RAG

One of my favourite English-language sentences appears in Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct. The sentence, which was created by Pinker’s student, Annie Senghas, is a syntactical marvel, at first utterly confounding, but perfectly structured and absolutely, 100% grammatically correct. The sentence reads as follows:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

On a first (and even second, third, or fourth) reading, that sentence seems like complete gibberish, a nonsense mantra repeating a single word eight times in succession. Only when one takes a step back and considers the various parts of speech the word “buffalo” can stand in for does the sentence’s meaning begin to come clear. Consider that “buffalo” can be a noun, the name of a city, or a verb. Then consider that the difficulty in Senghas’s sentence arises from the elision of articles and conjunctions that might serve as guides in breaking the sentence down into its syntactical components. Pinker explains it this way:

American bison are called buffalo. A kind of bison that comes from Buffalo, New York, could be called a Buffalo buffalo. Recall that there is a verb to buffalo that means “to overwhelm, to intimidate.” Imagine that New York State bison intimidate one another: (The) Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo (often) buffalo (in turn) buffalo (other) Buffalo buffalo.

Put that way, the sentence makes perfect sense, but is a lot less interesting. Senghas’s unadulterated string of words is a thing of beauty, a sentence to elicit joy and wonder in those for whom language and its structures are endlessly fascinating. READ MORE....

THE BROTHERS ASHKENAZI by I.J. Singer

2011-03-13T00:07:00.000-08:00

taken from GOODREADS

In the Polish city of Lodz, the brothers Ashkenazi grew up very differently in talent and in temperament. Max, the firstborn, is fiercely intelligent and conniving, determined to succeed financially by any means necessary. Slower-witted Jacob is strong, handsome, and charming but without great purpose in life. While Max is driven by ambition and greed to be more successful than his brother, Jacob is drawn to easy living and decadence. As waves of industrialism and capitalism flood the city, the brothers and their families are torn apart by the clashing impulses of old piety and new skepticism, traditional ways and burgeoning appetites, and the hatred that grows between faiths, citizens, and classes. Despite all attempts to control their destinies, the brothers are caught up by forces of history, love, and fate, which shape and, ultimately, break them.

First published in 1936, The Brothers Ashkenazi quickly became a best seller as a sprawling family saga. Breaking away from the introspective shtetl tales of classic nineteenth-century writers, I. J. Singer brought to Yiddish literature the multilayered plots, large casts of characters, and narrative sweep of the traditional European novel. Walking alongside such masters as Zola, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, I . J. Singer’s premodernist social novel stands as a masterpiece of storytelling.

Women in Art

2011-03-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

BAD THINGS HAPPEN By Harry Dolan

2011-03-02T15:57:00.000-08:00

taken from the Washington Post by PATRICK ANDERSON

Harry Dolan's droll and delightful first novel opens with a simple, ominous sentence: "The shovel has to meet certain requirements." This suggests the shovel in question may be intended for other than routine gardening chores. It suggests that, well, bad things may happen, which they soon do, in profusion. We learn that a man who calls himself David Loogan is in a store buying the shovel, rather furtively, and that he is an editor for a crime magazine called Gray Streets in Ann Arbor, Mich. We learn that he has bought the shovel because his boss, Tom Kristoll, the owner of the magazine, wants him to help bury a body. That's the first bad thing that happens.

Loogan likes Kristoll and feels guilty about having an affair with Kristoll's wife, Laura. So Loogan accepts his friend's story that he killed the man in his study in self-defense, and that it would cause too much of a fuss to call the police. They bury the man, whom Kristoll says is an ex-convict turned crime writer and extortionist. That, of course, is not remotely true.

For much of the book we don't know much about Loogan, except that he's 38, attractive to women and knows how to juggle. We get to know better the circle of writers and editors who are drawn to Gray Streets, odd characters with odd names like Nathan Hideaway, Rex Chatterjee, Bridget Shellcross, Casimir Hifflyn and Valerie Calnero. Unfortunately, as we get to know these people, they start experiencing death by murder. Tom Kristoll, the publisher, is only the next to go. READ MORE....

RECKLESS by Cornelia Funke

2011-02-28T21:16:00.000-08:00

taken from Thirst for Fiction

There is a mirror, in a dusty room of a nearly forgotten house. But it is no ordinary mirror. Behind it lie the lands of the Mirrorworld, a place of danger. Jacob Reckless has been trespassing it’s borders ever since he was a boy, reaping its secrets and its treasures. But then the unthinkable happens. Jacob’s brother, Will, finds the Mirror. And presses his hand against the glass, opening the gateway. And on the otherside, The Dark Fairy waits, ready to strike, ready to infect him with a curse that will turn his skin to Jade. He will become a Goyl, a stone-skinned, and he will serve their King…

Reckless is Cornelia Funke’s first fantasy novel since she completed the Inkworld Trilogy, and it is has certainly been worth the wait. Reckless is Funke doing what she does best; writing magical, romantic, beautiful fantasy novels.

It follows the journey Jacob Reckless undertakes as he tries to free his brother from a curse that will turn him into a Goyle, a stone-skinned being. Set in the Mirrorworld, it is a story full of adventure, romance and despair. Reckless is the story of the love between brothers, lovers and races; of new-found love, anguish and betrayal. READ MORE....

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower seeds at the Tate

2011-02-26T17:20:00.000-08:00

THE TIGER by John Vailllant

2011-02-24T15:52:00.000-08:00

taken from the New York Times by EDWARD LEWINE

The large and malevolent tiger at the center of this nonfiction hunting tale bears a striking resemblance to its fictional seafaring predecessors: the white whale and the movie-star shark (both of which, by the way, are said to have been inspired by real creatures).

The structure of John Vaillant’s book echoes that of “Moby-Dick,” alternating a gripping chase narrative with dense explanations of the culture and ecology surrounding that chase. “Jaws” fans will recognize the dramatic strategy of keeping the beast offstage as much as possible to allow terror to fill in the blanks, as well as a certain lurid detail at the book’s end, which I won’t reveal.

What makes “The Tiger” a grand addition to the animal-pursuit subgenre is the sensitive way in which Vaillant, a journalist and the author of a previous book, “The Golden Spruce,” that’s in the same murder-in-nature mode, evokes his cat. Few writers have taken such pains to understand their monsters, and few depict them in such arresting prose. READ MORE....

MADRE by Liza Bakewell

2011-02-21T23:56:00.000-08:00

taken from the author's website

Madre is a…marvel. Liza Bakewell brilliantly weaves a story that peels away layers of hidden meanings of the most fraught word of Mexico’s maternal cultura, revealing secrets many natives dare not speak. This is a book that will get tongues wagging. — John Phillip Santos, author of The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire

Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun began with some graffiti on a wall: A todo madre o un desmadre. I was in Mexico doing research for my PhD, and although my Spanish, I thought, was fluent, I had never seen that expression before. So I asked what it meant, and I was told that it was not proper for a woman to use those words. Not proper, because madremadre or qué madre or de poca madre” are used in the bar, on the street, and only by men.

Over the years, I developed a long list of Madre expressions, and I found friends to help me translate them. I became intrigued with the way the Mexican speakers shape their language and how language in turn shapes them, their goals, their dreams and their children.

I think of Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun as part memoir, part travelogue and part investigation into a culture and its language. How can me vale madre mean worthless and ¡que padre! mean marvelous? Why does madre mean whore as much as virgin? Join me as I travel thorough Mexico to investigate the madre phenomenon.

Whether you have lived in another country, are studying to learn another language, speak Spanish as your first language, enjoy learning about other cultures or just enjoy reading about how language affects our lives, I hope you enjoy Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun.

In her illuminating new book, Liza Bakewell…a linguistic anthropologist with sparkling credentials, turns to a single Mexican-Spanish word, "Madre," and discovers controversies and challenges…Beyond the obvious public issues in our headlines, all is not serene in our neighbor's house. — Portland Press Herald

One of Bakewell’s goals in writing this book was to 'write to everyone,' and she does that with aplomb. It’s safe to say that most people are fascinated with language in one way or another. — San Antonio Express News

…charming book, a mix of memoir, research and travelogue. — The Economist

THE MARX SISTERS By Barry Maitland

2011-01-15T15:33:00.000-08:00

taken from Felony and Mayhem

Mrs. Thatcher’s London is bristling with the newly rich bankers, and property developers who have declared the city their personal playground. but on tiny Jerusalem lane, time seems not so much to have stood still as to have slipped backwards. Its shabby houses are home to a clutch of elderly emigres, refugees from a once war-torn Europe who are still fighting ancient political battles, the Trotskyites thumping their canes in fury, the Leninists bellowing into the anarchists’ hearing-aids. To many outsiders, the lane’s enmities look like some quaint geezers’ hobby, a louder version of canasta. But then the geezers start dying.

This magical book – and a passionate desire to bring it to U.S. readers – was the reason behind Partners & Crime’s decision, in the early 1990s, to begin importing books from the UK. Felony & Mayhem is delighted to give it the second life it so richly deserves.

“Intricate and crafty…a true pleasure” — Los Angeles Times

“Maitland writes astonishingly well, with a wonderful ear for dialogue and a finely attuned sense of both character and place…extremely impressive” — Sydney Herald (Australia)

Read Stieg Larsson, the bestselling socialist militant

2011-01-14T22:38:00.000-08:00

taken from the Guardian by Nick Cohen

Graeme Atkinson provides an essential political service as the foreign editor of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. However necessary his work is, he never expected that he or any of his colleagues who dedicate their lives to the painstaking and occasionally dangerous task of exposing neo-Nazism would become celebrities. The global fame of Searchlight's former Stockholm correspondent is thus filling him with an unexpected delight.

In the next fortnight, he will hear the name of his old friend Stieg Larsson everywhere. The bookshops are preparing to receive 320,000 hardback copies of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the last volume of the extraordinarily popular Millennium trilogy. As the hype builds again, only three thoughts will make Atkinson wince: the memory of Larsson's death in 2004 at the miserably early age of 50; the knowledge that Sweden's sexist inheritance laws denied Larsson's partner, Eva Gabrielsson, a share of his posthumous royalties; and the irritation which always overcomes him whenever he hears the media describe his old comrade as a "liberal journalist".

Larsson was not a liberal or anything like one. He was a revolutionary socialist, but of a remarkably generous and democratic sort, from a radical tradition that is all but dead in Europe. The notion that the work of a writer who had once been the editor of Fjärde Internationalen, the journal of the Swedish section of the Trotskyist Fourth International, could move to every airport bookstall in the world would have once seemed absurd. At the very least, you might have assumed that there would be few connections between the two sides of his life. But I don't believe you can understand the appeal of Larsson without grasping an almost nostalgic yearning for the best of the half-forgotten politics he represented. READ MORE....

THE GRIMM READER: THE CLASSIC TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM translated and edited by Maria Tatar

2011-01-14T22:13:00.000-08:00

taken from The Book by Ellen Handler Spitz

Year after year, we print and re-print fairy tales. What is it that makes them valuable? Should we keep telling them, and if so, why? What about their detractors, the self-appointed child protectors who complain about their violence and cruelty, not to mention a different set of worriers who protest their “false” happy endings? And surely the tales do not teach morality. Remember the egregious brutality of that spoiled princess in The Frog King who, after hurling the little animal who helped her against the wall, gets rewarded. And we quail at even a mention of The Jew in the Brambles, an outrageous portrayal of barbarism and prejudice, which, in Maria Tatar’s new selection of the Grimm fairy tales, wisely appears only in a separate section marked for adults.

Nor do the tales psychologize or philosophize. What they do, instead, is what all great children’s literature does: they literalize metaphor. They lower their glittering buckets deep into the psyche’s well. Loyalty lifts spells. Jealousy becomes murder. Love trumps death. Fortune reverses. Wishes come true.

Not quite like ancient myths, which use nymphs and satyrs to explain recurring natural phenomena; nor like fables, whose timeless moral lessons are parlayed through the escapades of animal characters; nor like legends, which exude the pungent aromas of one particular locale and its history, fairy tales are stories spun into gold at the wooden wheel of a miller’s daughter: stories made to summon wonder, horror, enchantment—and not necessarily anything more. Uncanny in the purest sense of the word, which is to say, both bizarre and familiar at once, they are meant to be told, not read, and they truly possess an inexhaustible power. Children hold on tight, turn pale, close their eyes, and beg for more.

The Grimm Reader, a compilation of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, newly translated by Tatar, who has published voluminously and illuminatingly on these writings for decades, comes to us with a mischievous title. It reminds us that, in the wake of global terrorism, parents and teachers are questioning ever more nervously what sort of tales we ought to be telling children and why. In Lilith some years ago, Naomi Danis aired these anxieties, with responses from twenty writers and editors associated with children’s literature, a significant number of whom warned against “smarmy” sentimentality and against books that offer superficial “healing.” READ MORE....

MAIWA Handwoven Solutions to Winter

2011-01-12T22:35:00.000-08:00

Available at Jennie's.

Rare fibers, magical blends, and the skill of handweaving
create shawls that are a joy to wear.

Wild silks, cottons, wools, and linens make shawls
that are warm in winter and cool in summer.

They can be wrapped tightly or draped over a coat
providing a stunning breath of colour.

Masterfully hand-woven by artisans.
Each shawl a story in the wearing.

Prices range from $39.95 - $198.00.

BETWEEN SUMMER'S LONGING AND WINTER'S END by Leif GW Persson

2011-01-09T17:25:00.000-08:00

taken from the Royal Oak Public Library by Sarah Nagelbush

In February 1986, Sweden’s Prime Minister, Olof Palme, was assassinated. Even now, 24 years later, the crime remains unsolved. Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End gives us a fictional account of the months leading up to the assassination. Written by a leading Swedish criminologist, Leif GW Persson, the novel is an engrossing story, involving both Sweden’s regular police as well as the secret police.

Though billed as a novel similar to those of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, it shares little in common with these authors. Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is less of a character study than a political thriller. There are few characters whose lives we explore and want to spend time with, as the readers do in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. There’s no tough, multi-layered detective like Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. Instead, Persson invites us into the world of Swedish politics, crime and the police through a multitude characters – many of whom are extremely unlikeable.

We spend time with the chief of police, the head of the secret police, a special adviser to the Prime Minster, several policemen and women, as well as a retired professor. Through these characters, and others, we’re slowly drawn into a world of racism, hatred, and the occasional desire to seek out the truth – and, later, what might happen.

The novel starts with the apparent suicide of a visiting American journalist and slowly unfolds into a nightmare for both the regular Swedish police and the secret police. While at first confusing, the switching narratives gives us a broad understanding of what’s going on – and we know what’s happening long before some of the characters do.

Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is an intense, thrilling and ultimately satisfying (though slightly creepy) novel. You need not have read any other Scandinavian novels in order to enjoy Persson’s book. It is an untraditional novel about a very untraditional piece of Sweden’s history – one that still remains unsolved to this day.

THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN by Carolina de Robertis

2011-01-07T00:28:00.000-08:00

from KNOPF publishers

“An incantatory debut…This visionary book beautifully, bravely breaks open all the old secrets.”—Lisa Shea, Elle

From the verdant hills of Rio de Janeiro to Evita Perón’s glittering Buenos Aires, from the haven of a corner butcher shop to the halls of the United States Embassy in Montevideo, this gripping novel—at once expansive and lush with detail—examines the intertwined fates of a continent and a family in upheaval. The Invisible Mountain is a deeply intimate exploration of the search for love and authenticity in the lives of three women, and a penetrating portrait of the small, tenacious nation of Uruguay, shaken by the gales of the twentieth century.

On the first day of the year 1900, a small town deep in the Uruguayan countryside gathers to witness a miracle—the mysterious reappearance of a lost infant, Pajarita—and unravel its portents for the century. Later, as a young woman in the capital city—Montevideo, brimming with growth and promise—Pajarita begins a lineage of fiercely independent women with her enamored husband, Ignazio, a young immigrant from Italy and the inheritor of both a talent for boat making and a latent, more sinister family trait. Their daughter, Eva, a fragile yet ferociously stubborn beauty intent on becoming a poet, overcomes an early, shattering betrayal to embark on a most unconventional path toward personal and artistic fulfillment. And Eva’s daughter, Salomé, awakening to both her sensuality and political convictions amid the violent turmoil of the late 1960s, finds herself dangerously attracted to a cadre of urban guerrilla rebels, despite the terrible consequences of such principled fearlessness.

Provocative, heartbreaking and ultimately life-affirming, The Invisible Mountain is a poignant celebration of the potency of familial love, the will to survive in the most hopeless of circumstances, and, above all, the fierce, fortifying connection between mother and daughter.

REMARKABLE CREATURES by Tracy Chevalier

2011-01-02T22:52:00.001-08:00

from the Guardian by Ruth Padel

"New life is formed from extinction and death," wrote Darwin in 1838, in a private notebook. Some 20 years later, he based The Origin of Species on the fact that fossils document a continuum of life forms, demonstrating that millions of species died out as others took their place. A generation earlier, however, when Tracy Chevalier's rough-petticoated heroine was pulling out of cliffs in Lyme Regis the evidence that would go into this insight, nobody wanted to believe that God did not, as one of Chevalier's characters puts it, "plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created".

It is a stunning story, compassionately reimagined. In real life Chevalier's heroine, Mary Anning, was the greatest fossil-hunter ever. Her father was a not-very-successful cabinet-maker whom Jane Austen once asked to mend a chest, but his estimate was too high. Austen looked elsewhere, never knowing that the artisan she briefly met was teaching his gifted daughter to find the "curies", the fossil curiosities sold to Lyme tourists like herself.

As a young child, Mary survived a lightning strike, which people said made her strange and extra bright. She had an uncanny gift for finding fossils, was the origin of the tongue-twister "She Sells Sea Shells on the Sea Shore", and in 1811 when she was 12 (Darwin was two) her first big find, a "crocodile" later named ichthyosaurus, rocked the scientific world. She unearthed a plesiosaurus in 1823, a pterodactyl in 1828 and a squaloraja (a transition fish, between sharks and rays) in 1829.

Scientists were knocking at Mary's impoverished family's door from 1811. Even before Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur, "terrible lizard", in 1824, giant fossils were a hot scientific topic. Several male scientists owed their achievements to Mary's finds. She taught herself geology and anatomy and worked out, with the Oxford geologist William Buckland, that lumps known as bezoar stones were actually dinosaur faeces. To raise money for Mary, one patron, Colonel Birch, auctioned the fossils she helped him find. Later the French scientist Cuvier accused Mary of fraud, a charge she successfully rebutted. She died unmarried at 47, with the respect of the international scientific community. READ MORE....

THE WRONG BLOOD by Manuel de Lope

2010-12-30T13:44:00.000-08:00

from the New York Times

By ANDREA THOMPSON Published: October 29, 2010

This absorbing novel — the first from the distinguished Spanish author to be translated into English — is full of mild sensations. Mild humor (bacalao soaked for dinner in the toilet tank) gives way to mild horror (a woman bends over another’s baby with “the posture of certain all-consuming insects”), which in turn yields to mild philosophizing (on the “admiration that denizens of the rural world feel for folding things”). At times, the mildness turns to provocation, as when the main character, a simple yet baffling woman named María Antonia Etxarri, watches a troop of soldiers and has “a feeling that one of those soldiers, if not more than one, was going to rape her.” The placidity with which she faces this prospect is galvanic. But de Lope’s languid sentences, artfully translated by John Cullen, continue to unfurl, and you find yourself sinking back into the narrative as if it were quicksand.

On the face of it, the story, which begins just before the Spanish Civil War, is a straightforward one. María Antonia is indeed raped — by a sergeant marking his first wedding anniversary far from his wife. Decades later, she has inherited the estate of Las Cruces from her employer, Isabel Cruces. Enter Miguel Goitia, Isabel’s grandson, who is training to become a notarial lawyer and has chosen Las Cruces as a quiet place to study. There is some ineffable bond linking these three characters, but no one asks questions, and no one provides answers unbidden. READ MORE....

The Etiquette of Freedom: Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The Practice of the Wild

2010-12-22T16:29:00.000-08:00

description from shelfari

Gary Snyder joined his old friend, novelist Jim Harrison, to discuss their loves and lives and what has become of them throughout the years. Set amidst the natural beauty of the Santa Lucia Mountains, their conversationsharnessing their ideas of all that is wild, sacred and intimate in this worldmove from the admission that Snyder’s mother was a devout atheist to his personal accounts of his initiation into Zen Buddhist culture, being literally dangled by the ankles over a cliff. After years of living in Japan, Snyder returns to the States to build a farmhouse in the remote foothills of the Sierras, a homestead he calls Kitkitdizze. For all of the depth in these conversations, Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder are humorous and friendly, and with the artfully interspersed dialogue from old friends and loves like Scott Slovic, Michael McClure, Jack Shoemaker, and Joanne Kyger, the discussion reaches a level of not only the personal, but the global, redefining our idea of the Beat Generation and challenging the future directions of the environmental movement and its association with Deep Ecology.” The Etiquette of Freedom is an all-encompassing companion to the film The Practice of the Wild . A DVD is included which contains the film together with more than an hour of out-takes and expanded interviews, as well as an extended reading by Gary Snyder. The whole offers a rare glimpse of their extended discussion of life and what it means to be wild and alive.

W. H. Auden, from "The Fall of Rome"

2010-12-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

All together elsewhere,vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND by Helen Simonson

2010-12-16T13:55:00.000-08:00

Reviewed by Peter Scowen Globe and Mail

It’s funny all the different things people will take away from one good book.

I had never heard of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand when it landed on my desk, but its opening scene hooked me. Intrigued by the force and originality of the writing, and still at my desk, I searched the Internet for reviews and found them uniformly positive, but always with the critic trying to deposit Major Pettigrew into a different pigeonhole.

One critic described the novel as an intelligent updating of “the English village novel,” a genre known for its colourful stock characters (the stuffy retired colonel, the wacky vicar, etc.) and picturesque settings (cottages, hedgerows, sheep). Another placed it in a new, and apparently growing, genre: “romance for wrinklies,” a reference to the age of the title character and the woman he falls in love with. Another reviewer, perhaps already wrinkly himself, simply called it a “romantic comedy.”

None of these is incorrect, and in fact there is no question that the author, Helen Simonson, who grew up in a small East Sussex town (but now lives in the United States), is winking at the English village novel of yore. But it still seems downright odd to try so determinedly to pigeonhole, and thereby neuter, a generous-hearted novel about people of real character struggling to overcome a vast array of benumbing conventions: those of race, class and family; of the political correctness that seems to be the modern world’s only answer to the sins of past empires; and the particularly self-serving ethics espoused by the Youtube generation. READ MORE....

IN FREE FALL by Juli Zeh

2010-12-05T23:57:00.000-08:00

review by Material Witness

The inside of the dust jacket of In Free Fall, contains a photograph of the author staring back at the reader through piercing, ice blue eyes. Juli Zeh's stance in the photo is challenging, almost confrontational. It suggests the intellectual equivalent of the old football hooligan's chanted challenge. "Come and have a go if you think you're smart enough."

The photograph is perfect for a challenging novel. Was I smart enough for a novel focusing on a mystery centred around the relationship between two quantum physicists, one in which nothing is ever quite as it seems? Just about. I think I was in control of the narrative about 85% of the time...

But the freshness of Juli Zeh's voice and the refusal of In Free Fall - published elsewhere in the English-speaking world under the title Dark Matter - is the charm and power of a book that is unconventional.
Sebastian and Oskar are physicists - the former teaching in university in Germany and settled into domestic life with wife and son, the latter trying to uncover the secrets of the universe in Geneva. More-than-friends in earlier days, the relationship between the two is strained and increasingly abrasive. Oskar believes Sebastian has sold out on his true calling and is essentially wasting his talents when he could be working with his old friend on joining the list of immortal physicists.

Sebastian, who carries his genius heavily, has his equilbirum disturbed by a monthly dinner with Oskar and his family, and is in a troubled state by the time he drives his son Liam to scout camp. During the journey a catastrophic event takes place that ruptures the lives of all the characters. READ MORE....

STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG by Kate Atkinson

2010-12-03T13:01:00.000-08:00

review by Material Witness

Kate Atkinson writes prose of such simplicity and clarity that she makes the process look as if it is ridiculously easy. And even if the writing is almost certainly not easy - although it might be - the reading is. Her words flow off the page like the nectar of the Gods: delicious, golden, life-giving. Minutes and hours can pass without notice in her company.

Did I mention I like her books? I love her books. If Kate Atkinson wrote dishwasher manuals, I would read them. If Jackson Brodie, her private detective, spent 100 pages tying his shoelaces or mowing the lawn or reading a Kate Atkinson dishwasher manual, I would read it.
Tied to the deceptively simple, fluent writing are Atkinson's acute and incisive observational skills and fresh view of the world which allow her to bring new life to moribund and ordinary. These talents are deployed with particular precision and impact when describing human emotions and behaviour, which makes her characters multi-dimensional and fascinating and such compelling company on the page. Atkinson also has the gift of timing, continually delivering just the right line at the right moment. This is particularly true of Julia - Brodies' former lover - who is a peripheral character in this book but acts as a sort of commentator on Jackson's choices and actions, as he remembers what she might say at any particular juncture. (This is one of the attributes that makes her books so perfect for audio).

With all this going for it, Started Early, Took My Dog - the fourth book of the Jackson Brodie series - scarcely needs a plot, but Atkinson provides one anyway.

Brodie is back in hs native Leeds, searching out a family history for an adoptee who was moved to New Zealand by her new parents. Despite working all available official channels, he cannot find a trace of Hope McMaster's former life, and is forced to the conclusion that his client's history is less straightfoward and probably less legal than she believes. READ MORE....

FROZEN MOMENT by Camilla Ceder

2010-12-02T15:13:00.000-08:00

taken from Material Witness

Another week, another Scandinavian crime fiction author. Another strong, well-structured, terrifically readable novel and yet another strong, introspective leading man.

Inevitably, Camilla Ceder's debut novel Frozen Moment has led the marketing department at publisher Weidenfeld & Nicholson to draw comparisons with the famous names of Nordic fiction. "Move over Wallander", declares the back cover of the advance reader copy.

As good as this debut is - and it is very good, and full of promise for what is set to be the beginning of a series featuring Swedish detective Christian Tell - it's important to maintain a sense of perspective. Ceder has a long way to go before she will earn a place in the pantheon of Scandinavian crime fiction champions where Henning Mankell, the late Stieg Larsson and a very select number of others - Jo Nesbo perhaps - currently reside.

What she shares with these notables, and others such as Camilla Lackberg and KO Dahl, is a strong sense of place, excellent plotting and credible characterisation. If anything defines the extraordinary and apparently relentless rise of Scandinavian fiction, for me it is these three qualities, and in particular the plotting.
It would be easy to draw cheap stereotypical conclusions about ordered minds and ordered societies producing writers with organized minds who produce impeccably plotted and well executed novels. Cheap maybe, but the more Scandinavian fiction I read the more I am drawn to this idea. READ MORE....

THE SNOWMAN by Jo Nesbo

2010-11-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

taken from Euro Crime
by Maxine Clarke

THE SNOWMAN is a complex, intellectually satisfying plot with many twists and turns. I half-guessed what was behind one aspect of it, guessed wrong on another, and failed completely to spot a third. Every time events seemed to be explicable, something else happens to cause further confusion - and these constant wrong turnings are so well dovetailed together in such an exciting manner, as flaws in the logic of one outcome lead directly to the next phase of the chase, that this book really is impossible to put down. Not once, but time and again, we are forced to re-think what we thought was true, as the author shows events from a range of views and cleverly reveals just enough to stay several steps ahead of the reader.

The novel is superbly translated by Don Bartlett, who conveys the author's naturalistic, humorous style - and perhaps most importantly, Nesbo's sensitivity to the human condition, to fathers' relationships to their children, and to the random cruelness of biology. It's always hard to point to flaws in a crime novel in case one gives away too much to those who have not yet read it, but as usual with this author, I found the main climax over-elaborate, and spotted one or two other slight inconsistencies. I am also surprised that Harry remains so trusting of people, both in his home and at work, given what's happened to him in previous novels.

But never mind - this book is fantastic. It really is a must-read, not least putting to rest the unfair cliche that Scandinavian novels are all about doom and gloom - but mainly it's just a brilliant police procedural novel, whose plot and characterisation can't be beaten. Do yourself a favour and read it.

RED WOLF by Liza Marklund

2010-11-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

taken from the Nordic Bookblog by Peter

Red Wolf is the fifth book in Swedish crime fiction writer Liza Marklund’s series featuring reporter Annika Bengtzon. It is set in the middle of a very cold spell during the Swedish winter. Annika is still recovering from the traumas suffered in The Bomber, and still struggles with anxiety.

Now she has arranged a meeting with a journalist up in the northern Swedish town of Lulea about an old case of terrorism – a terrorist attack on a military airport named F21 by a group that called themselves The Beasts. However, when she arrives in Lulea to meet him, she is told that the journalist has been killed in a hit and run accident. It doesn’t take Annika long to find out that he has been brutally murdered.

Annika Bengtzon, an experienced crime reporter, suspects that the murder is linked to an attack against a nearby air base in the late sixties – the case she came up there to talk about. She makes a few small findings and starts to pursue them. And as more people are killed she uncovers evidence that links the killings: A mass-murderer is one the loose in Sweden. Seemingly one of the terrorists that were involved in the attack on F21 – a man who has since fled to France, and who is a known assassin – has now returned to Sweden and is behind the brutal murders. He was the leader of The Beasts and used to be code-named Dragon. READ MORE....

Shakespeare's sonnets by Don Paterson

2010-11-12T01:01:00.000-08:00

taken from the guardian.uk

Shakespeare's sonnets are synonymous with courtly romance, but in fact many are about something quite different. Some are intense expressions of gay desire, others testaments to misogyny. Wary of academic criticism, Don Paterson tries to get back to what the poet was actually saying.

Detail of a painting of Shakespeare, claimed in 2009 to be the only authentic image made during his life, dating from about 1610 – but since questioned.

The problem with reading Shakespeare's sonnets is the sonnets themselves, by which I mean their reputation. Much in the same way as it's almost impossible to see the Mona Lisa as anything but a parody of itself, or hear Satie's Trois Gymnopedies without the feeling that someone's trying to sell you something – a bar of chocolate perhaps – it's initially hard to get close to the sonnets, locked as they are in the carapace of their own proverbialism. "A Shakespeare sonnet" is almost as much a synonym for "love poem" as "Mona Lisa" is for "beautiful woman". When something becomes proverbial, it almost disappears; and worse, we're allowed to think we know it when we really don't.

The sonnets are close to being one such cultural cipher. If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have been breezily confident that I knew a fair number of them reasonably well, and had a few by heart. Then there was the literary dinner party. A hideously exposed bluff prompted me to re-examine my avowed familiarity. (Lesson: only bluff at parties where you can immediately walk to another, darker, part of the room – so you're not obliged to remain in your seat, blushing through the cheese course.)

At least I wasn't alone. Twain's definition of the classic, "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" is well known, but I might also add, less memorably, that a classic is a book you can safely avoid reading, because no one else will admit they haven't either. READ MORE....

Steal These Books

2010-11-09T22:38:00.000-08:00

taken from the NYTimes.com

By MARGO RABB

Published: December 16, 2009

Like many teenagers, I went through a brief shoplifting phase, pilfering a Maybelline Kissing Potion, a pack of Adams Sour Apple Gum and, as my final heist, a Toffifay candy bar. But I never would’ve considered stealing a book. Books, I believed, were sacred.

Apparently, not everyone shares this idea. With the recession, shoplifting is on the rise, according to booksellers. At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., the rate of theft has increased to approximately one book per hour. I asked Steve Bercu, BookPeople’s owner, what the most frequently stolen title was.

“The Bible,” he said, without pausing.

Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for. “Some people think the word of God should be free,” Bercu said. As it turns out, Bibles are snatched even at the Parable Christian Store in Springfield, Ore., the manager told me, despite the fact that if a person asks for a Bible, they’ll be given a copy without charge.

But this holiday season, the Good Book is hardly the only title in danger of being filched. At independent bookstores, thieves are as likely to be taking orders from Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book” as from Exodus.

Fiction is the most commonly poached genre at St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village of Manhattan; the titles that continually disappear are moved to the X-Case, safely ensconced behind the counter. This library of temptation includes books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, among others. Sometimes the staff isn’t sure whether an author is still popular to swipe until they return their books to the main floor. “Amis went out and came right back,” Michael Russo, the manager, told me.

At BookPeople in Austin, titles displayed with staff recommendation cards are a darling among thieves. “It’s so bad lately that I feel like our staff recommendation cards should read: ‘BookPeople Bookseller recommends that you steal ________.’ Apparently the criminal element in Austin shares our literary tastes, or are very prone to suggestion,” Elizabeth Jordan, the head book buyer, wrote in an e-mail message. READ MORE.....

HYPOTHERMIA by Arnaldur Indrisdason

2010-11-04T11:46:00.000-07:00

published in Canada by Random House

review by Maxine Clarke at Euro Crime

HYPOTHERMIA is among the very best of the books I've read this year. It's the sixth of the author's Erlendur series to be translated into English; it is truly a mature, masterful and utterly fantastic book.

It's a story stripped bare to the bone. A young woman, Maria, commits suicide at her holiday cottage on the shores of Lake Thingvellier. About 30 years ago, Maria's father Magnus fell from his boat and drowned in the same lake. Ever since then, Maria has been extremely close to her mother, Leonora, still living with her even after graduating from university and her marriage to a doctor named Baldvin, who moved in with the two women after his wedding to Maria. Leonora died of cancer two years before the book opens, during which time Maria gave up her job to nurse her mother, constantly at her side. Everyone assumes that part of the reason for Maria's suicide was her inconsolable loss.

READ MORE...

THE SECRET MINISTRY OF FROST by Nick Lake

2010-11-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

review by The Bookbag

Albino, unusually-named, half-Inuit, half-Irish and owner of an enormous estate, nobody could call Light a run-of-the-mill child. But things are about to get considerably more unusual for this newly-orphaned girl. With a father mysteriously missing in the Arctic for long enough to be declared dead and a funeral to organise, you would think she had enough on her plate. But within days, she's been followed by a mysterious man, attacked by a rogue bird of prey in her own garden, survived a kidnap attempt by men with cat's eyes, rescued by another man with the head of a shark, and entered into a death-pact with a shadow that's two hundred years old. And that's not to mention an old family retainer who appears to know more than he's letting on...

... Time for a trip to the Arctic to face the evil Frost and find her father, then!

READ MORE....

BEDTIME STORY by Robert J. Wiersema

2010-10-31T21:13:00.000-07:00

Publisher's notes from randomhouse.ca:

Following his bestselling 2006 debut, Before I Wake, Wiersema returns to his exquisitely plotted blend of supernatural thriller and domestic drama.

Novelist Christopher Knox began his writing career with a bang. The echo of that success still rings in his ears as he sets to work every morning on his second novel, ten years later. His wife feels like a single parent, and with Chris living in exile in a studio above their garage, it won't be long before she is.

Chris discovers a fantasy novel by an obscure author he loved as a child and gives it to his son, David. Father reads to son nightly, and To the Four Directions soon enthralls him. Until one night, when young David is reading alone, an inexplicable seizure leaves him in a mysterious state of unconsciousness. As his seizure recurs every night, his father learns that only one thing will calm it, a bedtime story from his strange new book.

Convinced that the secret of David's collapse is within its pages, Chris traverses the continent in search of the truth. Meanwhile, David wakes up within the story he has been reading, and as his father struggles to free him David struggles to survive, facing perils unimaginable in a world created to capture the hearts and souls of children like him. Both father and son are headed toward a fateful collision of worlds, and a showdown with ancient evils, both fictional and very real.

E-books: an up side you may not have considered

2010-10-27T20:18:00.000-07:00

In a Globe and Mail interview conducted at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, author Andrew O'Hagan makes the following observation about e-reading: "Oh, I love e-books. Good writing will sing off the screen and off the page just the same. On the other hand, there's one serious disadvantage to e-books that nobody has considered. What are the book-burners going to do? I'm from Scotland via Ireland, places where people have a history of burning books -- and Germany is a near neighbour, and Iraq's never off the telly. E-books may prove to be a serious challenge to the unenlightened. On the up side, nobody will be burning books."

Göran Lindberg and Sweden's dark side

2010-10-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

from the guardian.co.uk

The Sweden of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson - all shadowy rightwing conspiracies and prostitution rings – might not be so far from the truth

by Andrew Anthony

Retired Swedish police chief Göran Lindberg, who was jailed last week for rape and assault. Photograph: Rolf Hamilton/Scanpix/Press Association Images

If there was ever a real-life policeman who came close in progressive Swedish affections to Kurt Wallander, the bestselling creation of Henning Mankell, it would probably be Göran Lindberg, chief of police of Uppsala, the city north of Stockholm that is home to Sweden's most prestigious university. Although he lacked Wallander's humility and reticence, Lindberg was concerned, like Wallander, with the marginalised and neglected in Swedish society. He was the sponsor of a sanctuary for abused juveniles, for example, and was at the forefront of the campaign to institute a more sympathetic response to rape victims

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THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO by Patrick Ness

2010-10-24T11:47:00.000-07:00

I thought it was really, really good.

review taken from Some Novel Ideas

The Knife of Never Letting Go is narrated by Todd Hewitt, a boy living in a town of men and Noise. A war with the planet natives left all of the women dead and spread a germ through the male population that makes every thought audible (the Noise). The town, Prentisstown, named by Mayor Prentiss after himself, is populated by mostly miserable men, with a few sadists thrown in, and the Noise makes for a chaotic overload of information that no one can escape. Todd is fairly miserable, too, since he hasn't reached manhood yet, he is ignored by most of the men, and there's no escaping the Noise, no matter where he goes. That is until Todd and his dog, Manchee, find a hole in the Noise. This discovery opens a Pandora's Box of secrets about Todd's world, secrets the men of Prentisstown have worked for years to lock up. With a target on his back and his every thought available to others through his Noise, Todd runs from Prentisstown with Manchee, only to be pursued by a relentless army across the landscape of his planet.

The characters Ness creates in The Knife of Never Letting Go are vivid, sharp, terrifying, and terrified. Todd is a frightened boy whose poignancy is as palpable as his Noise is audible, and Ness manages to make Manchee into the most truthful dog-character I've ever encountered. The preacher/madman Aaron who hunts them is monstrous and wretched. And Ness somehow manages to make the Noise into a sort of character itself, one which reveals and betrays without sentimentality.

Todd's flight is also his journey into manhood, and Ness makes that odyssey at once tense and humorous, epic and human. Through Todd, Ness poses some thoughtful questions about manhood: When does a boy become a man? Are there rites of passage through which a boy must go in order to be considered a man? And what are the characteristics of a man? In addition to the questions about manhood, Ness addresses the idea of privacy and individuality. How can one realize his individuality without the privilege of privacy? What does it mean to be an individual? Can a person really have an individual identity in our world when we have lost so much of what was private to us?

Untranslatable Words from Around the World

2010-10-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

taken from matadornetwork.com

20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World

Written by Jason Wire

Photo: laogooli

There are at least 250,000 words in the English language. However, to think that English – or any language – could hold enough expression to convey the entirety of the human experience is as arrogant of an assumption as it is naive.

Here are a few examples of instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless.

1. Toska

Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

2. Mamihlapinatapei

Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start” (Altalang.com)

3. Jayus

Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh” (Altalang.com)

4. Iktsuarpok

Inuit – “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.” (Altalang.com)

5. Litost

Czech – Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, remarked that “As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.” The closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

6. Kyoikumama

Japanese – “A mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement” (Altalang.com)

7. Tartle

Scottish – The act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name. (Altalang.com)

8. Ilunga

Tshiluba (Southwest Congo) – A word famous for its untranslatability, most professional translators pinpoint it as the stature of a person “who is ready to forgive and forget any first abuse, tolerate it the second time, but never forgive nor tolerate on the third offense.” (Altalang.com)

9. Prozvonit

Czech – This word means to call a mobile phone and let it ring once so that the other person will call back, saving the first caller money. In Spanish, the phrase for this is “Dar un toque,” or, “To give a touch.” (Altalang.com)

10. Cafuné

Brazilian Portuguese – “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.” (Altalang.com)

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BURY YOUR DEAD by Louise Penny

2010-10-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

This sixth Gamache mystery is set partly in the tiny fictional (and oddly murderous) village of Three Pines, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. But most of the action takes place in Quebec City. A vibrant, sophisticated fortress city, which lives in the present but guards its past.

For that’s the other location of this novel. The past.

It's February and bitterly cold in Quebec City. But Chief Inspector Gamache barely notices. He's nearly consumed with grief and guilt over a police action he led - and the mistakes he made. He spends his time with his now-retired mentor, and in the peaceful library of the Literary and Historical Society. A bastien of the dwindling English population.

But if Gamache thought death was finished with him, he was wrong. The body of a celebrated eccentric is found in the Lit and His, and Gamache is drawn again into hunting a murderer. The victim is an amateur archeologist who was monomaniacal in his pursuit. He had spent his life trying to find the body of Samuel de Champlain.

This is the great mystery that has haunted Quebec for centuries.

Where is Champlain?

The founder of Quebec died 400 years ago. And while the burial places of nuns and farmers and minor functionaries of the time are known, no one knows what became of the Father of Quebec.

How could this be?

As Chief Inspector Gamache digs through the crime and the venerable old city it becomes clear the murder is rooted in this 400 year old mystery, and in people long dead. But perhaps not buried.

It also becomes clear to the Chief Inspector that to find the truth he needs to confront his own ghosts, and bury his own dead.

Publishers Weekly starred review says:

"Few writers in any genre can match Penny's ability to combine heartbreak and hope..."

Quiz: Banned Books

2010-10-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

taken from the guardian.co.uk

Banned books

Find out what books censors have sat on with this quiz from the Guardian.

Take the Quiz

2010-10-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

On Ted Hughes' 'Last Letter' to Sylvia Plath

2010-10-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

written by Al Alvarez, taken from the guardian.co.uk

Critic and friend of both Plath and Hughes, Al Alvarez ponders the rather 'uncooked' poem published for the first time last week

guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 October 2010 13.24 BST

"Last Letter", found by Melvyn Bragg in the British Library with the help of Hughes's widow Carol, and published for the first time in the New Statesman this week, is more a document than a poem. I can see why Hughes spent so long rewriting it (there are at least three unfinished versions in the archive, apparently) and then deciding it still wasn't really ready for publication. To me it has a slightly uncooked air, though of course he was a wonderful poet and there are some great passages in it. What is interesting for us now is that it does go part-way to solving the mystery of what happened on the weekend before Sylvia Plath died. (She was found dead around midday on Monday 11 February 1963.)

According to the narrative of the poem, Plath wrote Hughes some kind of suicide note, or a note hinting at the possibility of suicide, on the Friday, and by some perverse miracle of the Royal Mail it arrived too early: she posted it in the morning and he received it in the afternoon post. So he got the message before she intended him to. As the poem tells us, he went round to her home, having read the letter, which she then burnt in an ashtray "with a strange smile".

What then happened, according to the poem, is that the worst of all the possible jealous fantasies that were torturing Sylvia at that time (when I last saw her, on the Christmas Eve before her death, she was in terrible shape) were fulfilled: the poem says he spent the weekend with a girl called Susan (whom Bragg identifies as the poet Susan Alliston), with whom Hughes was having an affair. He took her to rooms in Rugby Street, in London, where he and Plath had celebrated their wedding night. He then spent the weekend with Susan, in the same bed he had shared with Sylvia. Meanwhile, he imagines Plath calling him repeatedly at his flat and getting no answer.

In other words, the poem is a confession: he is a guy in the witness box pleading guilty. It's very strong stuff, but it ain't finished. And I suppose it is one of those documents that will now be pored over up by a host of biographers. What is certain is that Hughes spent the rest of his life tormented by what had happened, which is probably why the poem was never published in his lifetime. Unlike, say, John Donne's equally tormented but beautifully modulated "A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day", Hughes must have decided that "Last Letter" was not balanced enough to be printed.

Dirt! The Movie - Official Trailer

2010-10-14T09:31:00.001-07:00

The Movie Inspired by William Bryant Logan's acclaimed book 'Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth', this documentary is a witty yet poignant look at man's relationship with dirt.

61 HOURS by Lee Child

2010-10-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

The household got right back into its settled routine. Peterson left, and the two day watch women went up to bed. Janet Salter showed Reacher to the front upstairs room with the window over the porch roof. In principle the most vulnerable, but he wasn't worried. Sheer rage would overcome any theoretical tactical disadvantage. He hated to be woken in the night. An intruder came through that window, he would go straight back out like a spear.

Five to two in the morning.

Twenty-six hours to go.

David Sedaris talks to Hadley Freeman

2010-10-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

taken from the guardian.uk by Hadley Freeman

A life in writing: David Sedaris

'Someone suggested that my new book is bedtime stories for children who drink'. The humorist David Sedaris talks to Hadley Freeman

The man routinely described as the best living humorist in America, David Sedaris, was recently enjoying a plate of marinated salmon over greens while signing books in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois when a fan decided he wanted more than the writer's autograph. So he reached over and grabbed a handful of food off the Sedaris plate. Understandably, Sedaris was not best pleased. In fact, he was downright annoyed, which is not a common reaction from a writer who tends to regard the world in general with wide-eyed affection and his readers in particular with real fondness ("I always think it's a good policy to like the people who like you," he says with an almost straight face). It wasn't the hygiene issue that bugged him. It wasn't even the loss of the food, although he was a little upset about that ("I'd been looking forward to that salmon!") – it was the fact that the man was trying to cheat. READ MORE....

Maurice Sendak

2010-10-06T18:13:00.001-07:00

Age is a form of kindness we do to ourselves.

- Maurice Sendak

THE MAN WITH THE BALTIC STARE by James Church

2010-10-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

The latest in the Inspector O series is here! And once again we are caught in the North Korean bureaucracy and twisted by multi-government plots, this time a combined effort to unite North and South Korea. Maybe. Inspector O figures it out. Sort of.

THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES by Stef Penney

2010-09-29T16:49:00.000-07:00

This book has been getting great reviews for awhile , and I have put off reading it for some reason. Well, I have read it now and there is no reason not to. I can recommend it to anyone who wants a good story, especially a good story set in Northern Canada, a good story that will inform you and stay with you and remind you of your own courage and fortitude.

review by Nicolas Lezard from The Guardian UK

Some eyebrows were raised when it was announced that Stef Penney had won the Costa (previously Whitbread) first novel award: although it is set in Canada, she had done all the research for her novel in the British Library and, being agoraphobic, had not set foot in Canada at all.

Yet this doesn't seem to be a problem. The novel is set in 1867, about a century before her birth, and how she's going to get back to that time without a time machine escapes me. Besides, it is not necessary to visit the location of one's novels; Saul Bellow didn't go to Africa before writing Henderson the Rain King; nor, for that matter, did Julie Burchill visit Prague to write No Exit. Actually, you can easily tell, for slightly differing reasons, that neither author visited the scenes they wrote about. But Penney's evocation of the frozen lands of northern Canada couldn't ring truer if she'd spent months wandering through the land with nothing but a pack of huskies and a native tracker for company. (If there is a possibility that the judges' decision was in some way skewed, one might more usefully look at the way that coffee figures repeatedly in the novel.) READ MORE....

THE HORSE BOY by Rupert Isaacson

2010-09-27T08:26:00.000-07:00

Everyone should read The Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson. It's about a horses and an autistic boy. Its about fathers and sons, fathers and mothers, parenting and love, parenting and unmitigated frustration, family and strangers. It's about shamans in all sorts of places. It's about Mongolia and that part alone makes it a good read. It makes you cry and wish you were there. It's about our lives and our communities, our children and ourselves. Please read it, even if you have seen the movie. It's good.

Bulbs are in!

2010-09-21T18:49:00.001-07:00