Friday Finds and Stuff

Has anyone read American Music by Jane Mendelsohn? It sounds really good but have not seen anyone blog about it (that I can recall).

About the Book---

From the author of I Was Amelia Earhart, a luminous love story that winds through several generations—told in Jane Mendelsohn’s distinctive mesmerizing style.

At its center are Milo, a severely wounded veteran of the Iraq War confined to a rehabilitation hospital, and Honor, his physical therapist, a former dancer. When Honor touches Milo’s destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to each of them, puzzling her and shaking him to the core.

As Milo’s treatment progresses, the images begin to weave together into an intricate, mysterious tapestry of stories. There are Joe and Pearl, a husband and wife in the 1930s whose marriage is tested by Pearl’s bewitching artistic cousin, Vivian. There is the heartrending story of a woman photographer in the 1960s and the shocking theft of her life’s work. The picaresque life of a woman who has a child too young and finds herself always on the move from job to job and man to man. And the story of a man and a woman in seventeenth-century Turkey—a eunuch and a sultan’s concubine—whose forbidden love is captured in music. The stories converge in a symphonic crescendo that reveals the far-flung origins of America’s endlessly romantic soul and exposes the source of Honor and Milo’s own love.

A beautiful mystery and a meditation on love—its power and its limitations—American Music is a brilliantly original novel. 

 Then this one just caught me eye, after I was discussing Shutter Island with a coworker.

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 Madness; Roy Porter

Medical historian Porter authoritatively traces how Western culture has explained and treated insanity. Holes bored in 7,000-year-old skulls indicate the earliest assessment of madness as spirit-possession. The ancient Greeks and medieval and Renaissance philosophers influenced by them replaced possession with irrationality as the cause of madness and exorcists with physicians as its curers. The Enlightenment stressed folly as the mark of madness; romanticism reacted by considering genius akin to madness. Asylums arose to secure the insane for their own good, and newly emergent psychiatry developed several ostensibly successful asylum strategies. As asylums became overloaded with incurables, however, disillusionment induced underfunding. Freud and his spawn came to psychiatry's rescue, but madness persists despite a century of psychoanalysis and of listening increasingly to what the insane say about their conditions. New drugs quash symptoms but have undesirable side effects, including dependency. Meanwhile, the medical profession is divided about the legitimacy of psychiatry.

 

I've finished (3) books since last weekend, but no reviews yet ---don't you hate that part sometimes? To me, sometimes it even takes the fun out of enjoying the book. Here's what I read and enjoyed  (each very different from one another).

• We Have Always Lived in a Castle; Shirley Jackson
• The Sun Also Rises; Ernest Hemingway
• Ape House; Sara Gruen

Hopefully, this weekend, I'll catch up a bit as I do have some rough drafts.  Hope you are having a good week.

Friday Finds

Did you come across any good books this week? I've been eying these (3).

Oh No, She Didn't; Clinton Kelly

(Oct. 12, 2010)

When I was home during the day, I use to love to watch Clinton and Staci and their fashion makeovers on What Not to Wear on TLC. So I was thrilled to see this book coming out soon. Here's what it's about.....

Muffin tops. Scrunchies. Suntan hose. Slut shoes. Visible panty line.

Who hasn’t had the unfortunate experience of witnessing—or (gasp!) actually wearing—one of these fashion disasters?

The atrocities Clinton Kelly has seen—it’s a surprise he hasn’t gouged out his own eyes. Mom jeans? Fancy fingernails? Tracksuits? In the same straight-talking style that has made TLC’s What Not to Wear a smash hit for eight seasons, the cheeky media personality and author of Freakin’ Fabulous shows women how to outfit themselves with confidence and style as he pokes fun at fashion "don’ts." From the most obvious faux pas (Texas tuxedos) to borderline offenses (peekaboo boobies), Clinton offers detailed and entertaining critiques of our top one hundred sartorial slip-ups. He turns his keen eye to wardrobe, color, cut, cleanliness, hairstyle, accessories, and even posture. And because he loves you, he presents easy alternatives and practical suggestions for creating fabulous outfits that will make you forget you ever wore socks with clogs.

Clinton also explains how to use trends to your advantage at any age, from deciding which ones work for you to understanding how to wear them to keep your look relevant. Because if you’re not comfortable in the sequined mini, everyone around you will know it.

A delightful mix of hilarious dish and expert fashion advice, Oh No She Didn’t will turn anyone from fashion victim to fashionista in no time.

 Botchan; Natsume Soseki

Botchan, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye, is a classic of its kind, a sly, funny, poignant tale about a young mans rebellion against the system. Since its original publication 100 years ago, it has enjoyed a timeless popularity among Japanese readers both young and old, making it, according to Donald Keene, probably the most widely read novel in modern Japan.

The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent four years teaching English in a middle school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges; and the result is a chain of collisions large and small.

Most of the story seems to occur in summer, against the drone of cicadas and the sting of mosquitoes. And in every way this is a summer book--light, sunny, and fun to read. Here, in a lively new translation much better suited to the American reader, Botchan should continue to entertain even those who have never been near the sunlit island on which these calamitous episodes take place. 

 

Anya, Fromberg Schaeffer

Anya Karinsky's beautiful life seemed like one long and perfect dream that would spin on forever.

But her wonderful world of dances, travel, medical school, and her beloved family ended one day late in the summer of 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland. The bombs that leveled her Warsaw home that day marked the beginning of her soul-stirring odyssey of endurance and escape, through years of horror and Holocaust. Strong when others grew weak, selfless in pursuit of freedom, Anya, once the beautiful, pampered daughter of privilege, turned herself into a survivor whom nothing and no one could destroy.

Friday Finds

More unread books that I came across recently. Did you find any new ones for your list and mine?

Confessions of a Catnip Junkie; Allan  Goldstein

(quit the eye rolling....you cat lovers know you want to red this)

(amazon)
Doo Doo wasn’t trying to run away from home. Doc and Fern were great humans, cat people to the core. But Doo Doo has a feral streak, and a sudden impulse sends him into the wilds of the city’s Glen Canyon, and then far beyond. Now he is very lost, but not so lost that he doesn’t know what he wants more than anything. It’s the same thing we all want—love and home—but Doo Doo needs to get there on four paws. And having his new best friend, a subway cat named Rass, tagging along doesn’t make it any easier. Doo Doo’s 6,000 mile odyssey across America —by jet, bus, big rig, ferry, Caddy, Cessna and paw—takes a full year. The lost cat attracts lost souls. He helps a homeless drunk find a home, a minor league pitcher find his fastball, a small town newscaster find the big time, a goth girl find her peace, and a widowed Air Force pilot find the last runway. Doo Doo tells his story in his own voice, we see what he sees, feel what he feels. And he promises to take you so deep inside his soul you’ll feel yourself purr.

 Elizabeth Street; Laurie Fabiano

(amazon)

First novelist Fabiano is dead-on in her portrait of the Italian-American immigrant experience. This engrossing cross-generational saga centers on the experiences of Giovanna Costa, from the small Italian fishing village where she is born to the bustling streets of New York's Lower East Side where she struggles to raise her family and make a living as a midwife after the death of her first husband. In America, the resourceful Giovanna and her second husband eventually open a fruit and vegetable stand, attracting the unwanted attentions of the notorious “Black Hand” crime organization. When Giovanni refuses to meet their demands, her daughter is kidnapped and held for ransom. Basing this story—including the kidnapping—on her own family's immigrant experiences, Fabiano provides a wealth of period detail, infusing the compulsively readable narrative with an authentic sense of time, place, and community.

 Asta in the Wings; Jan Watson

(amazon)

Asta in the Wings is the moving and often darkly funny story of Asta Hewitt, a resourceful seven-year-old and intrepid narrator growing up in an isolated house in Bond Brook, Maine. Shut off from the outside world and restricted to the company of a delusional mother and a bookish older brother, Asta is content to be part of a "society of three" constructing dramatic and fanciful worlds of their own. When circumstances push her into a strange outside world — with all of its discontents — Asta must find a way to assimilate while remaining true to herself and her fractured family. Jan Elizabeth Watson's debut novel puts her among the most promising new writers in the realm of imaginative literary fiction.

Friday Finds

Here's (3) books that I have not read, but I hope to someday soon :)

 

Kings of the Earth; Jon Clinch

(amazon)......In Clinch's multilayered, pastoral second novel (after Finn), a death among three elderly, illiterate brothers living together on an upstate New York farm raises suspicions and accusations in the surrounding community. After their beloved mother, Ruth, dies, Audie, considered mentally "fragile," is devastated, but goes on tending to the Carversville farm with his brothers Vernon and Creed. When Vernon, frail at 60 and not under a doctor's care, dies in his bed with evidence of asphyxiation, Creed is interrogated by troopers, along with Audie, the brother closest to Vernon. Family histories and troubles are divulged in short chapters by a cacophony of characters speaking in first person. Secrets and hidden alliances are revealed: Vernon's nephew, Tom, grew and sold marijuana, which the family used medicinally; the brothers endured painful, bloody haircuts administered by their father. Alongside the police troopers' investigation, each player contributes his own personal perspectives and motivations, including allusions to homosexual behavior. Inspired by the Ward brothers (of the 1992 documentary My Brother's Keeper), Clinch explores family dynamics in this quiet storm of a novel that will stun readers with its power.

Stones for Ibarra; Harriet Doerr

(amazon)........This is the story of an anglo married couple, Richard and Sara Everton, who, in a burst of idealism, move from San Francisco to an old family home and abandoned mine in Mexico. Why, in the face of vociferous objections and concern from all their friends, would they move to a house they know has no electricity or water and aren't even sure is still standing? Richard and Sara go "in order to extend the family's Mexican history and patch the present onto the past. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much of the rest of it was true, the width of sky, the depth of stars, the air like new wine, the harsh noons and long, slow dusks. To weave chance and hope into a fabric that would clothe them as long as they lived." Their years as Ibarra's only foreigners - Richard's work, his illness, Sara's work, her care of Richard, their neighbors and friends, the constantly surprising landscape, the stones - is a story told with affectionate and patient wisdom. Perhaps it is a story a long time coming: Harriet Doerr got her BA at age sixty-seven and published this (her first) book a year later. 

The Seven Sisters; Margaret Drabble

(amazon).....It's hard to get across just how flat-out thrilling, how readable, how absorbing is Margaret Drabble's novel The Seven Sisters. It sounds positively dull when you describe it: Candida Wilton, a faculty wife of late middle age, has been dumped by her allegedly do-gooder husband. Her three daughters aren't too impressed with her, either. The mousy Candida decamps to an inglorious flat in London, where she measures out her time in visits to the health club, trips to the grocery store, and her weekly evening class on Virgil. She tentatively makes a few new friends and rediscovers some old ones. This opening section of the book, told in diary form, is a marvel of tone. With very little action, Drabble makes Candida's forays into the world quietly electrifying. One of her new pleasures is recording in her diary her mounting dislike of her ex-husband. You sense a giddy freedom: "Andrew had come to seem to me to be the vainest, the most self-satisfied, the most self-serving hypocrite in England. That kindly twinkle in his eyes had driven me to the shores of madness." Ah, but there's more life for Candida yet. A small, unexpected inheritance is left to her, and so she organizes her friends--all female, mostly aged, mostly unmarried--into a tour of Naples as Virgil describes it in The Aeneid. Their holiday is a fictional tour-de-force: by turns a hilarious send-up of group dynamics, a metafictional lark, a feminist rant, and a dark acknowledgement of Candida's mortality. In the end, Drabble's novel is a very serious one, and a very good one.

Have you read any of these? 

Friday Finds

As always, I am so happy it's Friday!

Did you find any great looking books this week?  I found a few books by authors I am not familiar with. Have you read any of these?

 Henry's Sisters; Cathy Lamb

When the Bommarito sisters, Isabelle and Janie, hear that their domineering mother is going in for open heart surgery, they must forget the trauma of their childhood and return to their riverside Oregon hometown, Trillium River. Taking care of their mother and their demented grandmother (who believes she's Amelia Earhart) and watching after their mentally handicapped brother, Henry (possessed of an almost saintly, unconditional love for people), the independent sisters try to find a place in the world they've left behind. Lamb (The Last Time I Was Me) delivers grace, humor and forgiveness along with a litany of family trauma, which might seem heavy-handed in lesser hands. Fortunately, this finely pitched family melodrama is balanced with enough gallows humor and idiosyncratic characters to make it positively irresistible.

Receive Me Falling; Erika Robuck

Every slave story is a ghost story. The haunting words of an historian and former cane worker on the Caribbean island of Nevis launch Meghan Owen on her quest to unlock the secrets of an abandoned sugar plantation and its ghosts. After Meg's parents die in a car accident on the night of her engagement party, she calls off her wedding, takes leave of her job in Annapolis, and travels to land she's inherited on Nevis. A series of discoveries in an old plantation house on the property, Eden, set her on a search for the truth surrounding the shameful past of her ancestors, their slaves, and the tragedy that resulted in the fall of the plantation and its inhabitants. Through a crushing phone call with her lawyer, Meg learns that her father's estate was built on stolen money, and is being sued by multiple sources. She is faced with having to sell the land and plantation home, and deal with the betrayal she feels from her deceased father. In alternating chapters, the historical drama of the Dall family unfolds. Upon the arrival of British abolitionists to the hedonistic 19th century plantation society, Catherine Dall is forced to choose between her lifestyle and the scandal of deserting her family. An angry confrontation with Catherine's slave, Leah, results in the girl's death, but was it murder or suicide? Hidden texts, scandalous diaries, antique paintings, and confessional letters help Meghan Owen uncover the secrets of Eden and put the ghosts to rest.

The Suspect; L.R. Wright

To Karl Alberg, a small town on Canada's "Sunshine Coast" looks like the perfect place to sooth a psyche that's been battered by too much big-city police work. Bees buzz among the roses, and the local librarian is attractive, intriguing, and unattached. Perhaps he has at last come in from the cold. But sunny towns can conceal a lot of secrets-some of them bleak enough to make a man yearn for some nice straightforward urban crime. In 1986 The Suspect beat out titles by Ruth Rendell and Jonathan Kellerman to become the first Canadian novel to win an Edgar award. It went on to become a great cult favorite among mystery fans, who prized its delicately etched sense of melancholy, and intriguing character studies of the cop, his quarry, and the enigmatic librarian who proves an unlikely bridge between the two.

Friday Finds

I am so happy it's Friday, aren't you? 

Did you find any great looking books this week?  I found a few books by authors I am not familiar with. The first one comes out in Trade paperback on August 17th/Simon and Schuster.

The Human Bobby; Gabe Rotter.

(Simon and Schuster website)....THE GRIPPING STORY OF THE UNRAVELING OF ONE MAN'S SEEMINGLY PERFECT LIFE, AND HIS STRUGGLE TO GET EVERYTHING BACK.

A new baby, a loving wife, a solid career, a dream house in Beverly Hills: Dr. Bobby Flopkowski has it all. Until a complicated series of events snowball into a disaster that changes the course of his life forever.

Now, with a tent on the beach as his only home and an addiction that has cut him off from everyone he once loved, Bobby has a revelation that could put him back on track: he believes he has solved the puzzling crime that led to his downfall. But as the reality he's always known slips farther away, will he be able to convince someone—anyone—that his suspicions aren't merely the pleas of a desperate man?

Next....How about this one?

 Strangers; Taichi Yamada

(amazon)......Middle-aged, jaded and divorced, TV scriptwriter Harada is forced to set up home in his office, situated in a high-rise apartment block overlooking Tokyo's busy Route 8. One night, nostalgic for his lost childhood, he decides to visit the entertainment district of Asakusa, the city's dilapidated old downtown area, and there, at the theatre, he meets a man who looks exactly like his long-dead father. So begins Harada's ordeal, as he's thrust into a reality where his parents appear to be alive at the exact age they had been when they died so many years before. Although they may be apparitions, he takes solace in seeing them, in spite of the damage it seems to do to his health. Can Kei, the mysteriously fragile neighbour with whom Harada begins a tentative relationship, save him from the ghosts of his past?

Lastly......

Andean Express; Juan de Recacoechea

(amazon)........In this leisurely, character-driven study set in 1952 from Bolivian author de Recacoechea (American Visa), a train ride across the high Andean plain serves as the stage for a high-stakes card game, a quick sexual encounter and murder. The dramatic trip across the Antiplano from La Paz, Bolivia, to the Chilean seaport of Arica only incidentally recalls Agatha Christie's classic Murder on the Orient Express. The large cast mirrors the political and social scene, including an older businessman and his teenage wife, a skirt-chasing college student, a revolutionary disguised as a priest, expatriates from Ireland and Russia, and a deadly one-legged mine worker who struck at the floor with his crutches à la Long John Silver, his favorite fictional character. More Camus than mystery thriller, this novel delights like strong coffee savored in a cosmopolitan cafe. 

 

Friday Finds

Is anyone besides me curious about this newly released debut novel: Mr. Peanut; Adam Ross?  I think it sounds so creepy but fascinating. Here is what I found on Amazon about it:

Ross's inspired debut explores the proximity of violence and love and begins with the death of Alice Pepin, whose lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock—or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with M.C. Escher, Hitchcock, and working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a violent possible masterpiece. Gradually, the two detectives on the case begin to see disturbing parallels between their own marital dramas and the Pepins' cruel rotations of brinkmanship and adoration. Ross's depiction of love is grotesque and tender at once, and his style is commanding as he combines torture and romance to create a sense of vertigo-as-romance. It's a unique book—stark and sublime, creepy and fearless—that readers into the darker end of the literary spectrum won't want to miss.

How about this one? - Sounds good and Great Cover too

Devil Amongst Lawyers; Sharon McCrumb

(Amazon)......In 1935, when Erma Morton, a beautiful young woman with a teaching degree, is charged with the murder of her father in a remote Virginia mountain community, the case becomes a cause célèbre for the national press.

 Eager for a case to replace the Lindbergh trial in the public’s imagination, the journalists descend on the mountain county intent on infusing their stories with quaint local color: horse-drawn buggies, rundown shacks, children in threadbare clothes. They need tales of rural poverty to give their Depression-era readers people whom they can feel superior to. The untruth of these cultural stereotypes did not deter the big-city reporters, but a local journalist, Carl Jennings, fresh out of college and covering his first major story, reports what he sees: an ordinary town and a defendant who is probably guilty.

This journey to a distant time and place summons up ghosts from the reporters’ pasts:  Henry Jernigan’s sojourn in Japan that ended in tragedy, Shade Baker’s hardscrabble childhood on the Iowa prairie, and Rose Hanelon’s brittle sophistication, a shield for her hopeless love affair. While they spin their manufactured tales of squalor, Carl tries to discover the truth in the Morton trial with the help of his young cousin Nora, who has the Sight. But who will believe a local cub reporter whose stories contradict the nation’s star journalists? For the reader, the novel resonates with the present: an economic depression, a deadly flu epidemic, a world contending with the rise of political fanatics, and a media culture determined to turn news stories into soap operas for the diversion of the masses.
A stunning return to the lands, ballads, and characters upon which she made her name, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers is a testament to Sharyn McCrumb’s lyrical and evocative writing.

What great looking books have you come across this week?