Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World

ARTICLE: LibraryThing Interview with Shalom Auslander

2012-01-27T10:55:00.000-05:00

I think I found a new author to check out: Shalom Auslander. LibraryThing posted an interview with him this month, and just the introduction alone got my attention. As stated in the LibraryThing "State of the Thing":

Shalom Auslander is the author of the short story collection Beware of God and the memoir Foreskin's Lament. His first novel, Hope: A Tragedy is out this month from Riverhead Books.

Irreverent, crass, fearless and caustic, his character revealed through his interview and the titles of his books grabbed me. I've now added all of his books to my "Wish List"!

Check out his interview with LibraryThing, and if irreverent tales of a love/hate relationship with God interest you, you may want to check out his books as well.

REVIEW: Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go (e-book)

2012-01-21T12:23:00.000-05:00

Synopsis

Jem Perkins has it all – money, a fine house, a handsome husband, and a new baby boy. But when her family fortunes turn, Jem’s husband Seth leads her to a new home: a sod house on a Nebraska homestead.

It is a season of growth for Jem as she reluctantly confronts her new realities: back-breaking labor, dangerous illness, and mind-numbing isolation. She learns to embrace her new role as a capable woman and marriage partner and discovers an awareness of God’s hand in her life.

Then, on January 12, 1888, the history-making Children’s Blizzard sweeps across the land, ushering in a season of hardship she never expected. Can Jem’s confidence, marriage, and new-found faith weather the storm?

An Interview with the Author
from her website

How do you fit writing into your life? Do you have a regular routine?

I would love to have a routine! Life is pretty complicated right now. In addition to all the activities that come with a teen and a ‘tween, I’m the full-time caretaker for my husband, who is totally blind and chronically ill. He had a kidney-pancreas transplant in 1994, so his immune system is suppressed. Still, we both worked full time until 2005, when his health declined. He was in the hospital 9 times in 2010 with various infections and problems. This year he was in twice before the third time on April 13, when he went into the hospital and is still there now.

Three of my four books were written at my husband’s bedside, as well as many commission writing projects and editing jobs.   I once wrote 10,000 words on a novel in a single night at the Emergency Room. I know, because I added them up. I have no idea whether I ended up keeping any of those words, but I wrote them.

What are you passionate about?

My passion is making the moments of my life count. I’m deliberately idealistic in the face of reality: The world is broken and it’s going to stay that way until Jesus comes, but I believe we have to pour ourselves into making it better anyway. Second to that, launching my children well. I pray that they’re prepared, that they’ve learned to rely on Jesus, and that they will find God’s path for their lives. If I do nothing else well, I want to do this. And if I do everything else well but this . . . it just doesn’t count.

It’s also really important to me to help people; it’s my drug. If I think someone is in distress, I get all twitchy and strain to find a way to help. God had a fight on His hands when He decided it was time for me to learn to accept help instead of give it, but I’m getting there.

What is your writing process?

I usually begin with some core idea – character, concept or conflict. And sometimes I write out a scene if it plays in my head. But before I begin officially working on a book, I plan it out from beginning to end, down to the individual scenes. Sometimes I even plan next books for a potential series. The plan is flexible; things will change as I go along. But it’s a lifesaver when I haven’t written in weeks, I’m mind-numb with exhaustion and surrounded by beeping IV’s and rattling hospital machinery. I can check the map to see where I’ve been and where I’m going. I just plow through. When I can’t write well, I write badly. Then later I fix it.

How would you define your unique writing style? What sets you apart from other authors?

I’m a Christian author, but I struggle with the guidelines of the Christian Bookseller Association standards. It feels so unrealistic. Modern Christian readers connect with characters who make mistakes, lie, have blunt conversations with their girlfriends, and enjoy sex with their husbands. This is my standard: my characters make their mistakes, but I won’t write a yummy scene about them doing something dumb with a man they’re not married to.

Married sex, on the other hand . . .   Our culture delights in glorifying perversions. Why not give the good stuff – trusting, genuinely loving married sex – a little airtime too?   Young readers today are only exposed to images of sex outside of marriage. Romance novels, for example, have lots of explicit scenes, but if the characters are married, the story no longer constitutes a romance (trust me – I’ve grappled with this one for years).

I have been told – adamantly – that I’m leading people into sin by writing this way.   That may be so – I’ll ask God when I see Him. Meantime, in my life, He has dealt with me where I am and how I am. That’s the only story I know how to tell.

What else would you like to tell us about yourself?

I believe the Bible is the word of God, and that my job as a Christian is to serve and love. I’m in no hurry to leave this earth, but when I do go to heaven, I’m going to learn to play a musical instrument. Ten thousand years ought to do it. I’m going to sing, write, paint, keep a garden without worrying about the water bill, and I’m going to savor the fact that geographical distances no longer separate me from my loved ones.

Check out the author's website
Connect with the author on Goodreads
Connect with the author on LibraryThing

My Thoughts

January 12, 1888

At midnight, Charley woke shivering in his trundle bed. "Ma?"

Town/Location:

The story begins in St. Paul, Minnesota, moves into Kansas, and ends in Nebraska.

This story offers a glimpse into how hard life was (and still is to a great degree) in the west, and brings to light the story of the Children's Blizzard, which took place in January 1888.

Hot, scorching summers and brutal and unpredictable winters, the land is unforgiving and only the most stalwart individuals can survive. What chance do a couple of city folk stand?

Seth is a good man, brave and strong. Fair and ethical. He’s been a good provider for his family, a good father to his son, if a bit estranged from his wife.

Jemima has been raised a spoiled daughter and is now a somewhat indulged wife.

Jem and Seth married "liking" one another, "lusting" after one another, and perhaps even "loving" one another, but they didn't really know one another and weren't friends. Seth is with the military and has been gone traveling much of their marriage. Jem has been coddled and indulged by her father, who lives nearby and gave Seth and Jem the house that they live in with their infant son Charley.

Life takes a turn, and Seth chooses to move the family out West to become homesteaders in Nebraska. They know that life will be tough, but Seth seems to underestimate just how hard things can get.

In the beginning, Jem is spoiled, selfish and annoying. She isn't very likable by any means, often using tears to get her way with the men in her life. But the more that life throws at the family, the more Jem rises to the occasion.

My greatest disappointment with this story and the characters was Seth. I was disappointed that he only saw Jem for who she had been, and did not acknowledge the amazing woman that she had become. She showed herself in many circumstances to perhaps be even stronger and tougher than Seth.

This was my first e-book, and I've gotta say, I came to love being able to just pick up my phone and read a little here and there. It was a comfortable way to settle down at night, turn out the lights, and read one more chapter before giving way to sleep. This was the perfect introduction to the world of e-books!

My final word: This was a lovely story, and it really held me throughout. I kept wondering what was going to happen next? Would they survive the West? Would they find their way back to each other? Would life cast them a lifeline? I've been interested in the past with the Children's Blizzard, and this was a nice introduction to it. Tragic and stirring, leading you through the story with little drops of hope like Gretel's trail of breadcrumbs, I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a moving story that can touch your soul.

My Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book to review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel.

GIVEAWAY: Dreaming of Books Giveaway Hop

2012-01-12T20:18:00.000-05:00

The Dreaming of Books Giveaway Hop is co-hosted by I Am a Reader, Not a Writer and Reviews by Martha's Bookshelf.

For this hop, I decided to give two (2) winners their choice of book from my list of available books. The first winner will get first choice, and the second winner will get second choice. To enter, just complete the Rafflecopter form below.

NOTE: A few people have said that the form is not working properly, but it is working just fine for me, and some who reported it not working are shown as having entered through it. I did note that the code mentions that Java must be enabled, so you'll want to check under your browser Tools > Options and make sure that you have Java enabled!

Also please be aware that Rafflecopter often logs you in, and if it does it won't give you the opportunity to put in your name and email-- it already knows who you are! When it does this, you should see a little "Hi, Your Name!" in the upper right panel of the form.

NOTE 2: I don't know what could be going on with Rafflecopter, but the same people who are saying down in the comments that it isn't working are showing up in the Rafflecopter database. So it is actually working for them! I don't know what is happening on their end to make them think that it isn't working! If you think it isn't working for you, go ahead and leave a comment, and I will check the database to make sure you were actually added.
a Rafflecopter giveawayGo check out Kathy's blog to see the other 200+ blogs joining in this giveaway hop! Good luck, and thanks for stopping by!

ARTICLE: "Artist Carves Vintage Books Into Astoundingly Intricate 3D Sculptures"

2012-01-12T10:54:00.000-05:00

Treehugger posted an awesome article on Guy Laramee, an artist who carves vintage books into amazing sculptures!

Check it out!

Mailbox Monday (01-09-12 edition)

2012-01-09T09:15:00.001-05:00

Image licensed from bigstockphoto.com

Mailbox Monday is now hosted monthly by a different blog. Here is the official blog of Mailbox Monday. I've had my mailbox on hiatus for the holidays, but here are some of the books I've received in the last couple of months:

Wings: A Novel of WWII Flygirls by Karl Friedrich
Won from A Bookish Libraria

Based on the true World War II stories of America’s first female military pilots, this historic novel follows the story of a young woman from a dirt-poor farm family. Sally Ketchum has little chance of bettering her life until a mysterious barnstormer named Tex teaches her to fly and to dare to love. But when Tex dies in a freak accident, Sally must make her own way in the world. She enrolls in the U.S. military’s Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program at a special school known as Avenger, where she learns to fly the biggest, fastest, meanest planes. She also reluctantly becomes involved with Beau Bayard, a flight instructor and aspiring writer who seems to offer her everything she could want. Despite her obvious mastery of flying, many members of the military are unable to accept that a “skirt” has any place in a cockpit. Soon Sally finds herself struggling against a high-powered Washington lawyer that wants to close down Avenger once and for all.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Won from For What It's Worth

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line.

It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Marine veteran, Matterhorn is a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a young man at war.

It is an unforgettable novel that transforms the tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage, camaraderie, and sacrifice: a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.

(Matterhorn has been on my Wish List for so long, that I'm excited to finally have it on my TBR shelf!)

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
Won from Under My Apple Tree

In the near future, at a moment no one will notice, all the dazzling technology that runs our world will unite and turn against us. Taking on the persona of a shy human boy, a childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication. In the months leading up to this, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans – a single mother disconcerted by her daughter’s menacing “smart” toys, a lonely Japanese bachelor who is victimized by his domestic robot companion, an isolated U.S. soldier who witnesses a ‘pacification unit’ go haywire – but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is too late.

When the Robot War ignites -- at a moment known later as Zero Hour -- humankind will be both decimated and, possibly, for the first time in history, united. Robopocalypse is a brilliantly conceived action-filled epic, a terrifying story with heart-stopping implications for the real technology all around us…and an entertaining and engaging thriller unlike anything else written in years.

Cinema of Shadows by Michael West
Won from Wag the Fox

Welcome to the Woodfield Movie Palace.

The night the Titanic sank, it opened for business...and its builder died in his chair. In the 1950s, there was a fire; a balcony full of people burned to death. And years later, when it became the scene of one of Harmony, Indiana's most notorious murders, it closed for good. Abandoned, sealed, locked up tight...until now.

Tonight, Professor Geoffrey Burke and his Parapsychology students have come to the Woodfield in search of evidence, hoping to find irrefutable proof of a haunting. Instead, they will discover that, in this theater, the terrors are not confined to the screen.

Children of Paranoia by Trevor Shane
Won from Bibliojunkies

ALL WARS HAVE RULES

Rule Number One: No killing innocent bystanders.
Rule Number Two: No killing anyone under the age of eighteen.

BREAK THE RULES, BECOME THE TARGET

Since the age of eighteen, Joseph has been assassinating people on behalf of a cause that he believes in but doesn't fully understand. The War is ageless, hidden in the shadows, governed by a rigid set of rules, and fought by two distinct sides-one good, one evil. The only unknown is which side is which. Soldiers in the War hide in plain sight, their deeds disguised as accidents or random acts of violence amidst an unsuspecting population ignorant of the brutality that is always inches away.

Killing people is the only life Joseph has ever known, and he's one of the best at it. But when a job goes wrong and he's sent away to complete a punishingly dangerous assignment, Joseph meets a girl named Maria, and for the first time in his life his singleminded, bloody purpose fades away.

Before Maria, Joseph's only responsibility was dealing death to the anonymous targets fingered by his superiors. Now he must run from the people who have fought by his side to save what he loves most in this world. As Children of Paranoia reaches its heart-in-throat climax, Joseph will learn that only one rule remains immutable: the only thing more dangerous than fighting the War...is leaving it.

Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go by Naomi Dathan
Won through LibraryThing Early Reviewers

Jem Perkins has it all – money, a fine house, a handsome husband, and a new baby boy. But when her family fortunes turn, Jem’s husband Seth leads her to a new home: a sod house on a Nebraska homestead.

It is a season of growth for Jem as she reluctantly confronts her new realities: back-breaking labor, dangerous illness, and mind-numbing isolation. She learns to embrace her new role as a capable woman and marriage partner and discovers an awareness of God’s hand in her life.

Then, on January 12, 1888, the history-making Children’s Blizzard sweeps across the land, ushering in a season of hardship she never expected. Can Jem’s confidence, marriage, and new-found faith weather the storm?

(This is my first e-book. I was very hesitant to do an e-book, as I am a very tactile person who loves the look and feel of a bound book and loves the look of it on a shelf and having it as a constant visual reminder of the anticipated story held in its pages. However I must say, I am enjoying having this book on my phone, and being able to pull it out and just read it for a few minutes anywhere, anytime.)

Books that I've purchased from Barnes and Noble:

The Birth House by Ami McKay

An arresting portrait of the struggles that women faced for control of their own bodies, The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare—the first daughter in five generations of Rares.

As apprentice to the outspoken Acadian midwife Miss Babineau, Dora learns to assist the women of an isolated Nova Scotian village through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and unfulfilling sex lives.

During the turbulent World War I era, uncertainty and upheaval accompany the arrival of a brash new medical doctor and his promises of progress and fast, painless childbirth. In a clash between tradition and science, Dora finds herself fighting to protect the rights of women as well as the wisdom that has been put into her care.

The Alchemist by Paula Coelho

PAULO COELHO'S enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom points Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a journey to find wordly goods turns into a discovery of the treasure found within. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is an eternal testament to the transformation power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips

The Tragedy of Arthur is an emotional and elaborately constructed tour de force from bestselling and critically acclaimed novelist Arthur Phillips, “one of the best writers in America” (The Washington Post).

Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young man struggling with a larger-than-life father, a con artist who works wonders of deception but is a most unreliable parent. Arthur is raised in an enchanted world of smoke and mirrors where the only unshifting truth is his father’s and his beloved twin sister’s deep and abiding love for the works of William Shakespeare—a love so pervasive that Arthur becomes a writer in a misguided bid for their approval and affection.

Years later, Arthur’s father, imprisoned for decades and nearing the end of his life, shares with Arthur a treasure he’s kept secret for half a century: a previously unknown play by Shakespeare, titled The Tragedy of Arthur. But Arthur and his sister also inherit their father’s mission: to see the play published and acknowledged as the Bard’s last great gift to humanity. . . .

Unless it’s their father’s last great con.

By turns hilarious and haunting, this virtuosic novel—which includes Shakespeare’s (?) lost King Arthur play in its five-act entirety—captures the very essence of romantic and familial love and betrayal. The Tragedy of Arthur explores the tension between storytelling and truth-telling, the thirst for originality in all our lives, and the act of literary mythmaking, both now and four centuries ago, as the two Arthurs—Arthur the novelist and Arthur the ancient king—play out their individual but strangely intertwined fates.

The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggert

The book you hold in your hands is revolutionary, a groundbreaking exploration of the science of intention.Drawing on the findings of leading scientists from around the world, The Intention Experiment demonstrates that thought is a thing that affects other things. It is also the first book to invite you, the reader, to take an active part in its original research.

Using cutting-edge research conducted at Princeton,MIT, Stanford, and many other prestigious universities and laboratories, The Intention Experiment reveals that the universe is connected by a vast quantum energy field.Thought generates its own palpable energy, which you can use to improve your life and, when harnessed together with an interconnected group, to change the world.

In The Intention Experiment, internationally bestselling author Lynne McTaggart takes you on a gripping, mind-blowing journey to the furthest reaches of consciousness.As she narrates the exciting developments in the science of intention, she also profiles the colorful scientists and renowned pioneers who study the effects of focused group intention on scientifically quantifiable targets -- animal, plant, and human.

McTaggart offers a practical program to get in touch with your own thoughts, to increase the activity and strength of your intentions, and to begin achieving real change in your life. You are then invited to participate in an unprecedented experiment: Using The Intention Experiment website to coordinate your involvement and track results, you and other participants around the world will focus your power of intention on specific targets, giving you the opportunity to become a part of scientifichistory. A new Afterword by the author recounts the successes of the several Intention Experiments so far.

The Intention Experiment forces you to rethink what it is to be human. It proves that we're connected to everyone and everything -- and that discovery demands that we pay better attention to our thoughts, intentions, and actions. Here's how you can.

(I've been wanting to read this one. It reminds me of a book that I read and loved a couple of decades ago by the name of The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird.)

Thanks to everyone! For 2012, my goal is to spend less time on the computer and more time reading!

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (01-08-12 edition)

2012-01-08T08:52:00.000-05:00

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (01-04-12 edition)

2012-01-04T13:43:00.000-05:00

Debbie's Book Bag is giving away Wine to Water. Deadline is 1/16/12. US/Canada only.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

CHALLENGE: Florida Reads

2012-01-02T22:34:00.000-05:00

This is my own perpetual challenge, to try and read more books about Florida, or those that take place in Florida or somehow have Florida as a major component. I'll try to keep adding to this list as I discover more books that interest me, but here is what I have so far:

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Ten Beach Road by Wendy Wax
In the Rogue Blood by James Carlos Blake
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel
A Good Man by Larry Baker
Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews
Florida Roadkill (Serge Storms Mystery, #1) by Tim Dorsey
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald
Florida by Christine Schutt
Carl Hiaasen's South Florida Three-Book Set #2 by Carl Hiaasen
The Man Who Invented Florida by Randy Wayne White
Florida Straits by Laurence Shames
Weird Florida by Charlie Carlson
Love Finds You in Holiday, Florida by Sandra D. Bricker
Dream State: Eight Generations Of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, And Other Florida Wildlife by Diane Roberts
Boca Daze by Steven M. Forman
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
Catching Genius by Kristy Kiernan
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson

REVIEW: Jarred Into Being by Pat Lawrence

2012-01-02T08:28:00.000-05:00

Synopsis

After the tragic death of her parents, Eva Lange must battle for her freedom; indeed, her very life. Fleeing her aunt's abuser, she falls prey to a murderous drug lord and his wife in their luxurious lair of lust. Using her wits, beauty, and sexuality to save herself and break the bonds of captivity and degradation, Eva struggles against corruption and powerful political forces to reclaim her independence and save the life of the man she loves.

About the Author

Pat Lawrence is a Wisconsin author who has previously penned Murder Mysteries and stage plays.

When asked about what type of readers would be interested in this book, they responded: Anyone who enjoys fast paced, exciting fiction with a strong protagonist and convincing, fully drawn supporting characters will enjoy this book.

Check out their website
Like them on Facebook

My Thoughts

Eve was their only child, a "miracle baby," conceived after four years of trying, hoping and praying for a baby. Eva was a beautiful baby. Everyone said so.

Town/Location:

The book takes place in a number of cities, but much of it takes place in Corpus Christi, TX.

Eva Lange has been dealt a tough hand in life, losing her parents at a young age and being stuck with a flaky aunt to care for her. She is thrust into the world at a young age and forced to live by her wits. Luckily she is bright and charismatic, as well as being beautiful, all of which aid her in no small part in caring for herself. But her beauty can also be a bit of a curse, gaining her unwanted attention and helping to land her in some unsavory situations.

At one of the worst moments in her life, Eva meets Rafael. Rafael is both passion and compassion, and they fall in love.

Later, after she and Rafael are separated, Albert Sr. takes on a fatherly role for Eva, fulfilling her desire for a loving older man in her life who will take care of her and make sure that everything is okay.

Something about Junior reminds Eva of Rafael. Junior initially seems like a self-centered brat, but later proves himself to actually be quite capable, or at least proves to be a man with great potential.

Denny becomes like a little sister who looks up to Eva, and she is always underestimated by her father and brother, still thought of as a childish little girl.

This story was very readable, and there were enough twists and turns to keep my interest. I don't recall ever being bored with the storyline. However, highly sexualized, this isn't a book for everyone. At 287 pages, it's a comfortable read. I read it in under a week, which is quite fast for me!

Final word: A very interesting story that kept me engaged throughout. I kept wanting to know what would happen next, and wanted reassurance that everything would work out for Eva in the end.

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosure:

I received a copy of this book to review from the author, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel.

Best of 2011 and Looking Forward to 2012

2012-01-01T08:27:00.000-05:00

So, I made it through 34 books in 2011. A pittance for many book bloggers, but a respectable tally for me! My goal in 2012 is to have more time to read books that I really want to read, as I had so many "review" books to deal with this year. So my TBR shelf (shelves) keep growing and growing!

Here are my top ten favorite books that I read in 2011, with links to my reviews, listed in the order that they were read and reviewed:

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Can Katniss Everdeen win the final fight against the Capitol? Against all odds, she's survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she is still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no-one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12...

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

Fort Repose is an idyllic little town located in Central Florida. At least everything is idyllic until "The Day". "The Day" is the day that the bombs fell-- nuclear bombs-- and entire cities were wiped off the map.

Room by Emma Donoghue

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. . . . It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating--a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child.

The California Roll by John Vorhaus

What do the Merlin Game, the Penny Skim, the Doolally Snadoodle, and the Afterparty Snuke have in common? They’re all the work of world-class con artist and master bafflegabber Radar Hoverlander. Radar’s been “on the snuke” since childhood, but he’s still looking for his California Roll, the one big scam that’ll set him up in sushi for life.

Trouble arrives in the stunning, sassy package of Allie Quinn—either the last true innocent or a con artist so slick she makes Radar look like a Quaker. Radar’s hapless sidekick, Vic Mirplo, a lovable loser who couldn’t con a kid out of a candy cane, thinks Radar’s being played. But if love is blind, it’s also deaf, dumb and stupid, and before Radar knows it, he’s sucked into a vortex of double-, triple-, quadruple-crosses that’ll either net him his precious California Roll or put him in a hole in the ground.

As timeless as a perpetual-motion machine, as timely as a Madoff arraignment, The California Roll brings you deep inside the world of con artistry, where every fact is fiction and the second liar never has a chance.

The Civilized World by Susi Wyss

When Adjoa leaves Ghana to find work in the Ivory Coast, she hopes that one day she'll return home to open a beauty parlor. Her dream comes true, though not before she suffers a devastating loss—one that will haunt her for years, and one that also deeply affects Janice, an American aid worker who no longer feels she has a place to call home. But the bustling Precious Brother Salon is not just the "cleanest, friendliest, and most welcoming in the city." It's also where locals catch up on their gossip; where Comfort, an imperious busybody, can complain about her American daughter-in-law, Linda; and where Adjoa can get a fresh start on life—or so she thinks, until Janice moves to Ghana and unexpectedly stumbles upon the salon.

At once deeply moving and utterly charming, The Civilized World follows five women as they face meddling mothers-in-law, unfaithful partners, and the lingering aftereffects of racism, only to learn that their cultural differences are outweighed by their common bond as women. With vibrant prose, Susi Wyss explores what it means to need forgiveness—and what it means to forgive.

Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran

Smart and ambitious, Marie Tussaud has learned the secrets of wax sculpting by working alongside her uncle in their celebrated wax museum, the Salon de Cire. From her popular model of the American ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, to her tableau of the royal family at dinner, Marie’s museum provides Parisians with the very latest news on fashion, gossip, and even politics. Her customers hail from every walk of life, yet her greatest dream is to attract the attention of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI; their stamp of approval on her work could catapult her and her museum to the fame and riches she desires. After months of anticipation, Marie learns that the royal family is willing to come and see their likenesses. When they finally arrive, the king’s sister is so impressed that she requests Marie’s presence at Versailles as a royal tutor in wax sculpting. It is a request Marie knows she cannot refuse—even if it means time away from her beloved Salon and her increasingly dear friend, Henri Charles.

As Marie gets to know her pupil, Princesse Élisabeth, she also becomes acquainted with the king and queen, who introduce her to the glamorous life at court. From lavish parties with more delicacies than she’s ever seen to rooms filled with candles lit only once before being discarded, Marie steps into a world entirely different from her home on the Boulevard du Temple, where people are selling their teeth in order to put food on the table.

Meanwhile, many resent the vast separation between rich and poor. In salons and cafés across Paris, people like Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre are lashing out against the monarchy. Soon, there’s whispered talk of revolution. . . . Will Marie be able to hold on to both the love of her life and her friendship with the royal family as France approaches civil war? And more important, will she be able to fulfill the demands of powerful revolutionaries who ask that she make the death masks of beheaded aristocrats, some of whom she knows?

Spanning five years, from the budding revolution to the Reign of Terror, Madame Tussaud brings us into the world of an incredible heroine whose talent for wax modeling saved her life and preserved the faces of a vanished kingdom.

The Bells by Richard Harvell

The celebrated opera singer Lo Svizzero was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps where his mother served as the keeper of the loudest and most beautiful bells in the land. Shaped by the bells’ glorious music, as a boy he possessed an extraordinary gift for sound. But when his preternatural hearing was discovered—along with its power to expose the sins of the church—young Moses Froben was cast out of his village with only his ears to guide him in a world fraught with danger.

Rescued from certain death by two traveling monks, he finds refuge at the vast and powerful Abbey of St. Gall. There, his ears lead him through the ancient stone hallways and past the monks’ cells into the choir, where he aches to join the singers in their strange and enchanting song. Suddenly Moses knows his true gift, his purpose. Like his mother’s bells, he rings with sound and soon, he becomes the protégé of the Abbey’s brilliant yet repulsive choirmaster, Ulrich.

But it is this gift that will cause Moses’ greatest misfortune: determined to preserve his brilliant pupil’s voice, Ulrich has Moses castrated. Now a young man, he will forever sing with the exquisite voice of an angel—a musico—yet castration is an abomination in the Swiss Confederation, and so he must hide his shameful condition from his friends and even from the girl he has come to love. When his saviors are exiled and his beloved leaves St. Gall for an arranged marriage in Vienna, he decides he can deny the truth no longer and he follows her—to sumptuous Vienna, to the former monks who saved his life, to an apprenticeship at one of Europe’s greatest theaters, and to the premiere of one of history’s most beloved operas.

In this confessional letter to his son, Moses recounts how his gift for sound led him on an astonishing journey to Europe’s celebrated opera houses and reveals the secret that has long shadowed his fame: How did Moses Froben, world renowned musico, come to raise a son who by all rights he never could have sired?

Like the voice of Lo Svizzero, The Bells is a sublime debut novel that rings with passion, courage, and beauty.

The Reversal by Michael Connelly

Longtime defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to change stripes and prosecute the high-profile retrial of a brutal child murder. After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller is convinced Jessup is guilty, and he takes the case on the condition that he gets to choose his investigator, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch.

Together, Bosch and Haller set off on a case fraught with political and personal danger. Opposing them is Jessup, now out on bail, a defense attorney who excels at manipulating the media, and a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years.

With the odds and the evidence against them, Bosch and Haller must nail a sadistic killer once and for all. If Bosch is sure of anything, it is that Jason Jessup plans to kill again.

Smonk by Tom Franklin

It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men-- all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results.

Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers.

Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine.

In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the timethe smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever.

Jarred Into Being by Pat Lawrence

After the tragic death of her parents, Eva Lange must battle for her freedom; indeed, her very life. Fleeing her aunt's abuser, she falls prey to a murderous drug lord and his wife in their luxurious lair of lust. Using her wits, beauty, and sexuality to save herself and break the bonds of captivity and degradation, Eva struggles against corruption and powerful political forces to reclaim her independence and save the life of the man she loves.

And here is a list of some of the top books that I look forward to reading in 2012:

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Sometimes being on the vanguard of scientific progress thrusts you into the teeth of danger. For Minnesota pharmaceutical researcher Dr. Marina Singh, that means being sent into the remotest region of the Amazon jungle to track down her former mentor. Finding Dr. Annick Swenson promises to be perilous: The last scientist assigned to find her has disappeared too. What follows is the most ambitious novel yet by Bel Canto author Ann Patchett as its adventure story opens into a penetrating study of personalities, loyalties, and ethics. Editor's recommendation.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Marine veteran, Matterhorn is a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a young man at war. It is an unforgettable novel that transforms the tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage, camaraderie, and sacrifice: a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

A richly inventive novel about a centuries-old vampire, a spellbound witch, and the mysterious manuscript that draws them together.

Deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library. Diana has stumbled upon a coveted treasure lost for centuries-and she is the only creature who can break its spell.

Debut novelist Deborah Harkness has crafted a mesmerizing and addictive read, equal parts history and magic, romance and suspense. Diana is a bold heroine who meets her equal in vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and gradually warms up to him as their alliance deepens into an intimacy that violates age-old taboos. This smart, sophisticated story harks back to the novels of Anne Rice, but it is as contemporary and sensual as the Twilight series-with an extra serving of historical realism.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women - mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends - view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Obviously, something went terribly wrong. Genetic mutations have festered, reducing human longevity to twenty-five, even less for most women. To prevent extinction, young girls are kidnapped, mated in polygamous marriages with men eager to procreate. Sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery, a recent victim of this breeding farm mentality, has vowed to break loose from its fetters; but finding allies and a safe way out is a challenge she can only hope she will survive. A dystopian fantasy series starter with wings. Editor's recommendation.

Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel

One sunny morning in 1969, near the end of her first trip to Miami, twenty-six-year-old Frances Ellerby finds herself in a place called Stiltsville, a community of houses built on pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay.

It’s the first time the Atlanta native has been out on the open water, and she’s captivated. On the dock of a stilt house, with the dazzling skyline in the distance and the unknowable ocean beneath her, she meets the house’s owner, Dennis DuVal—and a new future reveals itself.

Turning away from her quiet, predictable life back home, Frances moves to Miami to be with Dennis. Over time, she earns the confidence of his wild-at-heart sister and wins the approval of his oldest friend. Frances and Dennis marry and have a child—but rather than growing complacent about their good fortune, they continue to face the challenges of intimacy, and of the complicated city they call home.

Stiltsville is the family’s island oasis—until suddenly it’s gone, and Frances is forced to figure out how to make her family work on dry land. Against a backdrop of lush tropical beauty, Frances and Dennis struggle with the mutability of love and Florida’s weather, and with temptation and chaos and disappointment.

But just when Frances thinks she’s reached some semblance of higher ground, she must confront an obstacle so great that all she’s learned about navigating the uncharted waters of family life can’t keep them afloat.

In Stiltsville, Susanna Daniel interweaves the beauty, chaos, and humanity of Miami as it comes of age with an enduring story of a marriage’s beginning, maturity, and heartbreaking demise.

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

Magic is dangerous--but love is more dangerous still.

When sixteen-year-old Tessa Gray crosses the ocean to find her brother, her destination is England, the time is the reign of Queen Victoria, and something terrifying is waiting for her in London's Downworld, where vampires, warlocks and other supernatural folk stalk the gaslit streets. Only the Shadowhunters, warriors dedicated to ridding the world of demons, keep order amidst the chaos.

Kidnapped by the mysterious Dark Sisters, members of a secret organization called The Pandemonium Club, Tessa soon learns that she herself is a Downworlder with a rare ability: the power to transform, at will, into another person. What's more, the Magister, the shadowy figure who runs the Club, will stop at nothing to claim Tessa's power for his own.

Friendless and hunted, Tessa takes refuge with the Shadowhunters of the London Institute, who swear to find her brother if she will use her power to help them. She soon finds herself fascinated by--and torn between--two best friends: James, whose fragile beauty hides a deadly secret, and blue-eyed Will, whose caustic wit and volatile moods keep everyone in his life at arm's length...everyone, that is, but Tessa. As their search draws them deep into the heart of an arcane plot that threatens to destroy the Shadowhunters, Tessa realizes that she may need to choose between saving her brother and helping her new friends save the world...and that love may be the most dangerous magic of all.

Here's wishing everyone happy reading in 2012!

REVIEW and GIVEAWAY: Say Not What If by Andrew Friedman

2011-12-22T08:43:00.001-05:00

Synopsis

"Say Not What If" is a nearly 10,000 word story written as a long rhyming poem. I have never seen a story written in this format. It has characters and dialogue just like a regular story, and is extremely easy to read and understand, regardless of whether you have a GED or a PHD. You can read it in about an hour, so it doesn't require a lot of time.

“Say Not What If” is about a man on death row, and has as its theme the concept that time is our most valuable commodity. As someone once said, “waste anything but time, because we really are promised no tomorrows.” This theme is explored through the life of a man who sacrifices his marriage and everything else for his career. He realizes much too late the terrible consequences of this decision, and then desperately tries to regain those lost years by making a much worse choice. The resolution of this latter choice involves an additional examination of the concepts of accountability and responsibility, redemption, and the morality of the death penalty.

Paperback, 52 pages
Published July 11th 2011 by CreateSpace
ISBN 1463627319

About the Author

Author Andrew Friendman is an attorney, although he has no experience with the death penalty. He has written an essay as a follow-up to Say Not What If, intended to "provide some background information on the current state of this critically important issue."

My Thoughts

Say not "what if" or wonder why
About all the things you did not try.
Say not "what if" or be heard to sigh
With a trembling voice and a tear in your eye
"Why did I let time go by?"

Say Not What If is a poetic novel from the perspective of a man on death row looking back over his life.

This issue is very personal to me, since I have a friend on death row. My best friend for a time in my late teens (we even talked about getting a place together after I graduated high school), we fell apart after he married at about 19 years of age. Things went downhill for him over the next decade, and the next that I heard of him, he was being sought after for a triple homicide that occurred during a robbery. After going on the run, he was finally apprehended on the other side of the country, along with his accomplice.

During the investigation, evidence was found to connect him to the crime scene, but no definitive proof was ever discovered that could point at him as the killer (or the sole killer). There were two people perpetrating the crime, both pointing their finger at the other as the killer, and no proof of which one did it, or whether both were involved.

So one is offered a deal to turn on the other, in exchange for life in prison and no death penalty. The other (my friend) is found guilty and condemned to death. But did he do it? Or was it his accomplice? And if his accomplice and he were both involved, shouldn't they both get the same sentence?

So now I am counting the days, waiting for word that his time is up. I read years ago that the average stay of a death row inmate in Florida is 15 years. My friend has been on death row now for...13 years, I think? Something like that. I got to see him last summer, after testifying on his behalf at an appeals hearing. The judge was kind enough to allow us to meet and talk for about 15 minutes after court had adjourned, amazing the counsel, as it was very unusual for a judge to grant such a concession.

So this story kind of hit home for me, and I really understand on a personal level the inconsistencies in sentencing, the preferential treatment given to some and not others, the risks of executing an innocent person, at least "innocent" in regards to what they are being sentenced death for-- killing another human being-- if not innocent of other crimes.

This was an interesting way to relay an idea-- as an almost 10,000 word poem. Well-written and engaging the mind, it gets you thinking and asking yourself questions on the subject of the death penalty, however not as much as I would hope. The villain is very "villainous", not eliciting too much sympathy. There is no question that he committed his crime, and it was a truly heinous crime involving a small child. Many who read his story will feel he got exactly what he deserved.

Some of the biggest debates of the death penalty are those over the "unfairness" of it all-- the fact that poor black men are more likely to be sentenced to death than affluent white. The most frightening debate is over whether it should be allowed if there is any chance of an innocent being executed. This story won't really incite too many of those types of conversations.

At only 52 pages long, it is a pretty quick read. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the death penalty debate. In fact, I am giving away my copy of Say Not What If to another reader to experience and review.

Rules (you knew there had to be some):

You must be 18 years or older
Open to US and Canada residents only
To enter, just comment below. Be sure to leave your email address in your comment, or have it visible in your profile.
Be a book reviewer that will review this book on your own blog and/or on sites like GoodReads, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Deadline is January 14, 2012

Please note that this book is being shipped by me, and will be shipped without insurance or tracking. Therefore I am at the mercy of the post office. So far no book that I've shipped has been lost by them, but I can make no guarantees!

Thanks to the author Andrew Friedman for giving me the opportunity to read his story.

Amazon.com Widgets

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosure:

I received a copy of this book to review from the author, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel.

Teaser Tuesdays (12-20-11 edition)

2011-12-20T07:37:00.001-05:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today's Teaser:

My victim lived at the end of the street
A girl of eight, so naive and sweet.
Always happy and eager to greet
As she ran around in just her feet.

-- Say Not What If by Andrew Friedman, page 12

2011 Challenge Recap

2011-12-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

I did horribly on my challenges, per the usual. These challenges I don't expect to get any further with before the end of the year:

Foodie's Reading Challenge hosted by Joyfully Retired. I only read 2 out of 7 books planned.

2011 YA Reading Challenge hosted by For the Love of YA. I only made it through 4 of the 12 books planned.

Dystopia Challenge hosted by BA Reading Challenges. I only got through 1 of 5 of the books planned.

Off the Shelf challenge hosted by BA Reading Challenges. I made it through 10 of the 15 books desired.

New Authors challenge hosted by Literary Escapism. Close but no cigar! I made it through 22 of the planned 25 books.

Wish I'd Read That Challenge 2011 hosted by My Love Affair with Books. I made it through 4 of my 6 books.

Zombies: Satisfy Your Undying Hunger hosted by Book Soulmates. I only made it through 2 of the 10 books I'd hoped to get through.

Get Steampunked hosted by BA Reading Challenges. I didn't read any steampunk this year!

2011 Outdo Yourself Reading Challenge hosted by The Book Vixen. The only challenge I completed, having read my 32 of 32. I expect to read another book or two before the end of the year, so I should exceed my goal.

For 2012, I am planning far fewer challenges, since I have proven repeatedly to do terrible at them! Thanks for the challenges!

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (12-17-11 edition)

2011-12-18T08:28:00.001-05:00

NOTE: A reminder that you are free to email me about any giveaways that you are having, if you want me to blog them, and I'll be happy to try to post them even if I am not entering them. Just include a link to the giveaway, what you are giving away, how many copies are being given away, and the deadline in order to assure being included. Email me at nfmgirl AT gmail DOT com.

Here is a list of some giveaways going on in Blogworld*. Please note that new giveaways that were added this week are indented in Blockquotes:

Books: A True Story is giving away your choice out of six books that you can identify. Deadline is December 24. International!

For the love of books is giving away your choice out of four YA books. Deadline is December 31. International!

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Other Life. Deadline is December 31. US/Canada only.

Books Like Stars is having a massive "Debut Author" giveaway! US only.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

REVIEW: First Love: Just Once in a Lifetime: A Memoir by Violeta Barrett

2011-12-11T23:49:00.001-05:00

Synopsis

By 1956 Violeta Barrett had been working for a Wall Street investment firm more than a decade. Recently separated from her husband and feeling overworked, Violeta decided to vacation in Mexico. After her plane landed in Mexico City, a stranger with a deep, accented voice introduced himself as her tour guide. Violeta and Jorge had no idea they were about to begin a four-year romance that would endure the test of time and distance.

In her compelling memoir, Violeta shares a nostalgic and emotional journey where principles, love, and obligations collide and force unexpected decisions. Energized by the Mexican culture and Jorge's charm, Violeta is soon caught up in the joy of being loved. But before long she must return to her obligations, leaving Jorge behind. Through the more than seventy love letters she would receive from Jorge for the next few years, the two share a forbidden passion-until the forces of morality prevail.

Nearly fifty years ago, Violeta and Jorge fell in love, changing their lives forever. Their heartfelt story proves that true love is not affected by time. It is ageless. It is eternal.

ISBN-13: 9781450279932
Publisher: iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date: 2/9/2011
Paperback, 224 pages

About the Author
from her website

Violeta Barrett, a Brooklyn transplant, moved from Canada to Ft. Myers, Florida, where she resides today, following her second husband's death. She has been published in the anthology Beyond Coping, and her poetry and writings have been printed in her local newspapers. Her passions are classical music, travel, photography, and, of course, love.

Visit her website
Read an article from our local newspaper
Learn more about the author

My Thoughts

Most women dream about finding love. Many do, but for many others, it remains a dream. I was one of the lucky ones, I thought. But love doesn't always come in a nice, neat package; it can truly be both agony and ecstasy.

Location/Environment:

While the author lived in New York during much of the story, her love affair with Jorge took place in Mexico City and the surrounding area.

At around thirty years of age in 1956, Violeta had already been working for more than ten years at a Wall Street investment firm. During that time, she had also married, but separated from her husband after two years in an unconsummated marriage.

So it was at this point in her life that she decided she'd earned a vacation, and headed down to Mexico. As she steps off of the plane, she is greeted by a handsome Mexican tour guide by the name of Jorge. Over the next couple of weeks, Violeta and her tour companions are taxied around Mexico by Jorge, always charming and informative, if at times a little deceitful with his knowledge, making up what he doesn't know.

...Always eager to learn something new, I hung on to every word. Unlike the others, I didn't ask many questions until I became aware that some of his answers were suspiciously familiar. Out of earshot of the two women, I whispered to him, "Didn't you just use that term to refer to something else?"

He looked at me squarely and grinned. For a second I was puzzled but then I got it. I couldn't help grinning back.

"Why you trickster, you!" I stifled a laugh. "How do you know I won't snitch?"

"You won't do that, will you?" he replied. His eyes sparkled. "Tourists ask many detailed questions. They really don't care what the answer is, as long as you answer." (page 14)

I loved a scene relayed in the book of a time they were approaching a town, and as had become common, children surrounded the car, poor and beggarly, clamoring for money. Initially Violeta and her companions would give the children pesos, until Jorge pleaded with them to stop.

"Please don't make beggars of my people," he said.

Astonished, I asked, "What would you have us do, Jorge? Ignore them? They're children!"

Without faltering, he opened the car window and spoke to several of the boys in Spanish. They ran ahead of the car, clearing the way. Others shouted to their friends, who backed off. I soon realized he had put them to work, finding us a parking spot. One enterprising boy diligently polished the side view mirrors with the tail of his shirt, smiling broadly at us.

Jorge patted him lightly on the head. "Bueno," he said, then called out to the other boys, "Muy bien, muchachos." I learned a lesson that day I never forgot. (page 7)

I loved how, instead of giving out charity, he instilled worth in the children by having them work for what they received. It was payment for a job well done rather than charity.

As the days pass, and the group tours Mexico, Jorge and Violeta's feelings for one another grow. By the time that Violeta heads back to New York, both she and Jorge believe themselves to be in love.

The first 40-plus pages tell the story of their affair, while the other 150 or so pages are of Jorge's letter to Vy over the years, after she returns to New York.

This is one of those stories that is very personal, so it is hard to be critical at all. I am also inclined to feel sensitive towards the author and this story, given that she happens to be a local here in town. You tend to be protective of your own!

There isn't really much to be critical of as far as writing style and the like. The only really critical thing I have to say in that respect is that the timeline wasn't laid out very well, so I had a hard time envisioning how everything happened. I had to sort out her age, am still unclear on how long she was in Mexico, although I think it to be around 2 weeks, and feel that other things were left unclear as well. Like how she found out about Jorge's wife and when he had married. None of Jorge's letters ever mention his marriage, unless it was in one of the few letters not included in the book. Or perhaps he told her in one of their few phone calls over the years? I don't know. So I feel that bits of the story are missing, so I don't have a complete picture.

The love story was sweet, but unfortunately I'm a bit jaded and cautious where love is concerned, so I have to be skeptical of a love born from a brief encounter. I like to think it was genuine and sincere and full, but Jorge's letters smack a little of co-dependency to me. I felt suffocated by the clinginess of them much of the time. But given the way that their love has hung with Violeta all of these years, I have to trust that it was as deep and meaningful to them as a decades-long love affair.

My final word:
Sweet and lingering. If romance is your cup of tea, give this real-life one a try.

Purchase your own copy of First Love.

My Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosure:

I received a copy of this book to review from the author, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel.

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (12-11-11 edition)

2011-12-11T08:39:00.010-05:00

Stuck in Books is giving away $12 to Amazon or Book Depository. Deadline is December 13. International!

Cuzinlogic is giving away a $10 for Barnes and Noble or Book Depository. Deadline is December 13. International!

Review Broads is giving away 5 copies of The Drop. Deadline is December 15. US only.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away Come Back to Me. Deadline is December 17. US/Canada only.

Books: A True Story is giving away your choice out of six books that you can identify. Deadline is December 24. International!

For the love of books is giving away your choice out of four YA books. Deadline is December 31. International!

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Other Life. Deadline is December 31. US/Canada only.

Books Like Stars is having a massive "Debut Author" giveaway! US only.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

WINNER: The Invisible Floating Bookshelf (Book Lover's Holiday Giveaway Hop)

2011-12-10T11:31:00.000-05:00

I'm a little slow with picking my winner, as it has been a bit crazy this week, but I've finally got my winner for an invisible floating bookshelf, in honor of the Book Lover's Holiday Giveaway Hop. And the winner chosen by random.org is...

Entry #15 Mariah Overlock

Congratulations, Mariah! I will be emailing you to get your mailing address. There will be more giveaways coming up after the holidays, which I hope all of you enjoy with your family and friends. Stay tuned!

Teaser Tuesdays (12-06-11 edition)

2011-12-06T10:12:00.001-05:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today's Teaser:

"Oh darling, please forgive me if I do wrong telling you this. I know I don't have the right to go as far as proposing to you. I'm just nobody, but if someday I get to be something and if you still love me, I'm going to beg you to be my wife."

-- First Love: Just Once in a Lifetime: A Memoir by Violeta Barrett (page 67)

GIVEAWAY: Book Lover's Holiday Giveaway Hop 2011

2011-12-02T07:44:00.000-05:00

You love books? You love the holidays? You love winning free stuff? Well, then you're in the right place! You've happened upon the Book Lover's Holiday Giveaway Hop, hosted by Kid Lit Frenzy & I Am a Reader, Not a Writer.

There are 250+ blogs participating in this giveaway, and you can find the entire list here.

For my part, I am giving away a large Invisible Floating Bookshelf:

I love these things! So far, I have two of them by my bed. I may add more to my office and living room in the future! I have a small one to hold books that I've committed to reviewing, and a large one that I have to hold those books that I am most eager to read "just for fun".

The large bookshelf holds up to 20 pounds. Just look at how many books I have on my large shelf!

Quite an impressive load for a single, thin metal shelf, huh?

However I should mention that the large bookshelf isn't really "invisible" like the smaller one is. The base of the bookshelf is so large that a book must be at least 10" wide for it to be capable of covering the base and hiding it. So I find that I have to set books on the shelf, meaning that the shelf is visible from underneath, and there is the potential that if someone bumped into the shelf, they could cause all of the books to fall off the shelf. This hasn't been an issue for me.

Want your own invisible floating bookshelf? Use the Rafflecopter widget below for your chance to win! Be a follower (either via GoogleConnect, Email, Facebook, or Networked Blogs), and get an extra entry. Good luck, and thanks for stopping by!

REVIEW: Smonk by Tom Franklin

2011-11-23T06:53:00.002-05:00

Synopsis

It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men&#8212all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results.

Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers.

Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine.

In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the time the smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever.

ISBN-13: 9780061142772
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 11/6/2007
Pages: 272

About the Author
from Goodreads

Tom Franklin was born and raised in Dickinson, Alabama. He held various jobs as a struggling writer living in South Alabama, including working as a heavy-equipment operator in a grit factory, a construction inspector in a chemical plant and a clerk in a hospital morgue. In 1997 he received his MFA from the University of Arkansas. His first book, Poachers was named as a Best First Book of Fiction by Esquire and Franklin received a 1999 Edgar Award for the title story. Franklin has published two novels: Hell at the Breech, published in 2003 and Smonk published in 2006. The recipient of the 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, Franklin now teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program and lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their children.

Find the author on Goodreads

My Thoughts

It was the eve of the eve of his death by murder and there was harmonica music on the air when E.O. Smonk rode the disputed mule over the railroad tracks and up the hill to the hotel where his trial would be.

Town/Location:

Old Texas, Alabama

I learned of this book from author Alden Bell when reading an interview with him for my review of his book The Reapers are the Angels. He listed Smonk as one of his favorite books, and I said at that time that after reading the synopsis for Smonk, I could see where he got his inspiration for his character Temple in The Reapers are the Angels.

This book is a rip-roaring ride! I had mentioned to my friends early on that this book was the most vile and obscene book I’d ever read, and yet the most entertaining. The author is unapologetic in his approach, seeming to set aside all sensibilities and censor. Brash and unadulterated, this story is totally in your face, almost daring you to be offended.

The widows fired and fired and fired and fired until the final cartridge hull clattered to a stop on the wagon floor and what was left of the judge resembled a steaming mass of afterbirth, blue and dripping. The silence of the world shocked them all. (p. 95)

Smonk is portrayed as a pretty despicable character, and is easily disliked from the beginning.

I heard he killed his own momma, he said.

For starters, said the other. (p. 8)

Evavangeline, on the other hand, while tough and unforgiving, and a 14-year-old prostitute on the run, is portrayed with a certain vulnerability. I found myself hoping for her redemption.

She tipped out the blood and prized free a gold molar with her knife and let him go and when he fell his head bled across the bunk like a can of paint overturned. She stepped back reloading. The gunpowder at such range had burned the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. The Gramophone’s needle had been knocked ajar and she set it back and then, for a moment of her life, as smoke curled in the air, she listened to strings of Handel. (page 23)

The cover is as fascinating as the book was, and can’t really be described. The silhouette of a mean looking outlaw in front of a rundown town straight out of the wild west. The rain, the orange moon, the skeletal canine formed out of willowy smoke. Fascinating!

As for the writing style, I like the shorter paragraphs. One thing I did have difficulty with was the lack of quotations used in dialogue, initially making it difficult to tell the conversations apart from the narration. But I got used to this pretty quickly, so it didn’t take away from my enjoyment.

This is my first book by Tom Franklin, and I look forward to reading more of his work. I think Hell at the Breach may be next on my list.

Final word: Pick up this book, sit back with a drink, cover your ears and brace your sensibilities. You’re in for the ride of a lifetime!

My Rating: 9.5 out of 10

CHALLENGE: 2012 ARC Reading Challenge

2011-11-22T23:34:00.003-05:00

The 2012 ARC Reading Challenge is hosted by The Eclectic Bookshelf. I thought that this challenge would be a good way to keep track of my ARC books, as well as those I am requested to review.

The nitty gritty:

What qualifies for this challenge?:

1. Actual Advance Reader Copies - this includes from tour sites like ATW Tours.

2. Any book that YOU ARE ASKED by either an author, publisher, publicist, media group, etc. to review.

3. Book Sneeze, Pump Up your Books, Tyndale and S&S Galley Grab ("they send out a monthly list & the first ~100 to get to their site gets the book to review").

What does NOT qualify for this challenge?:

1. Any book that YOU personally asked for a review copy of.

2. Netgalley

The Rules:

Anyone can join.
You don't need a blog to participate.
Non-Bloggers: Post your list of books in the comment section of the monthly wrap-up post on Jamie's blog.
Audio, eBooks, and bound books count.
No need to list your books in advance. You may select books as you go. Even if you list them now, you can change the list if needed.
Create a sign up post and link to the linky below.
Challenge runs from January 1, 2012 - December 31, 2012.
Crossover challenges is ok

There are four levels:

The Mini ARC Challenge – Read 4 ARC's.
The "Fun Size" ARC Challenge – Read 10 ARC's.
The Jumbo Size ARC Challenge – Read 20 ARC's.
The Mega size ARC Challenge – Read 21+ ARC's.

NOTE: You may UPGRADE your challenge but you can NOT DOWNGRADE your challenge.

I'm trying for the "fun size" of 10 books.

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CHALLENGE: 2012 "Bucket List" Reading Challenge

2011-11-21T22:36:00.001-05:00

The 2012 "Bucket List" Reading Challenge is hosted by The Eclectic Bookshelf.

The nitty gritty:

1. Challenge starts on January 1, 2012 and goes until December 31, 2012.

2. You don't need a blog to participate.

3. Create a "sign up" post and link to the linky below.

4. There are 4 levels to this challenge....

      a. The Mini Cooper level - 4 "bucket" list books
      b. The Mid-sized Sedan level - 8 "bucket" list books
      c. The Pick Up level - 12 "bucket" list books
      d. The Semi level - 13 or more "bucket" list books

NOTE: I am adding a stipulation to this challenge. If you originally decided to start small with the Mini Cooper level and decide to upgrade that is fine. But once you decide to go big you can NOT downgrade.

5. Each month a review link will be posted. Please feel free to link up your reviews where ever you happen to post them...your blog, goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.

I am going Mini Cooper level, although I hope to read more. But it's best to start small and work your way up! Here is a link to my bucket list.

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CHALLENGE: 2012 Outdo Yourself Reading Challenge

2011-11-21T22:11:00.000-05:00

The 2012 Outdo Yourself Reading Challenge is hosted by The Book Vixen. I'm initially setting this for one book beyond what I expect to do this year. If I wind up not doing what I expect, I may adjust this number in 2012.

The nitty gritty:

Runs January 1, 2012 – December 31, 2012 (books read prior to 1/1/12 do not count towards the challenge). You can join at anytime. Sign up on The Book Vixen’s blog.
The goal is to outdo yourself by reading more books in 2012 than you did in 2011. See the different levels below and pick the one that works best for you. Nothing is set in stone; you can change levels at any time during the challenge.
Books can be any format (bound, eBook, audio).
Re-reads and crossovers from other reading challenges are allowed.
Grab the reading challenge button and post this reading challenge on your blog to track your progress. Please include a link back to this sign-up post so others can join the reading challenge too. You do not have to be a book blogger to participate; you could track your progress on Goodreads or LibraryThing.

Levels:

Getting my heart rate up – Read 1–5 more books
Out of breath – Read 6–10 more books
Breaking a sweat – Read 11–15 more books
I’m on fire! – Read 16+ more books

I will be going for 1-5 more books than I read this year. I'm thinking I may set my goal at 35, but won't have my definite number until 2012, after I see what my final totals are for 2011.

CHALLENGE: Just for Fun 2012

2011-11-21T21:50:00.000-05:00

It's time to begin the challenge commitments for 2012. The first one that I've signed up for is the "Just for Fun" challenge hosted by Escape with Dollycas Into a Good Book. I have so, so many books just waiting to be read, yet I keep getting buried under review books. Hopefully this will help remind me to take the time to read "just for fun"!

The nitty gritty:

All book formats are allowed, printed, audio, e-book.
These books can be counted in your total books read for the year challenge and to one other challenge such as a Where Are You Reading Challenge but try not to cross them over to many other challenges as they really are to be read.
JUST FOR FUN! Everyone that completes the Challenge, 12 books in 12 months will be entered in a drawing for a $25 dollar Amazon.com Gift Certificate or $25 at The Book Depository for International Participants.
Sign up: Start your own thread on the JUST FOR FUN GoodReads Reading Challenge 2012.

JANUARY- Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go by Naomi Dathan
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER

Santa's holding all my packages again!

2011-11-21T19:50:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year again! I started a tradition a couple of years ago, whereby any books coming into my house up through Christmas go straight under the Christmas tree (along with any Secret Santa gifts), to be opened by me Christmas morning (or maybe Christmas eve). So Mailbox Monday will be on hiatus until January. Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

Author Ann Patchett's Impromptu Speech

2011-11-21T19:29:00.001-05:00

Author Ann Patchett makes an impassioned impromptu speech in support of the grand opening of Parnassus Books Nashville on November 19th.

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (11-19-11 edition)

2011-11-19T07:00:00.039-05:00

Fresh Fiction is giving away 20 copies of Love Me to Death. Deadline is November 21.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. Deadline is November 26. US/Canada only.

I am a Reader, Not a Writer is giving away Crossed. Deadline is November 28. US only.

Lila DiPasqua is giving away a collection of romance novels! Deadline is November 29.

Madeline Hunter is giving away an ARC of The Surrender of Miss Fairbourne. Deadline is November 30.

Cathie Linz is giving away Smart Girls Think Twice. Deadline is November 30. US only.

Wendy Corsi Staub is giving away If Only in My Dreams and The Best Gift. Deadline is November 30. US only.

Fresh Fiction has tons of giveaways! Most seem to be romance:

Five copies of Taken by Desire. Deadline is November 30.
Five copies of Last Breath. Deadline is November 30.
Five copies of A Simple Winter. Deadline is November 30.
Five copies of Until There Was You. Deadline is November 30.
A copy of Because of You. Deadline is November 30. US/Canada only.
A copy of In Good Hands. Deadline is November 30.
A copy of Model Marine. Deadline is November 30.
Win a copy of Attracted to Fire with a Le Creuset Stoneware filled with flavor! Deadline is November 30.
Five copies of Wanna Get Lucky. Deadline is November 30.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Strangers on Montagu Street. Deadline is December 3. US/Canada only.

Fantasy's Ink is giving away your choice out of fifteens books. Deadline is December 8. International!

Books Like Stars is having a massive "Debut Author" giveaway! US only.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

I Wanna...Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen

2011-11-18T07:00:00.004-05:00

Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen

Little Finn lives with his mother in an apartment in a working-class suburb of Oslo. Life is a struggle to make ends meet, but he does not mind. When his mother decides to take a lodger to help pay the bills, he watches with interest as she freshens up their small apartment with new wallpaper and a sofa paid for in installments. He befriends their new male lodger, whose television is more tempting to him than his mother would like.

When a half sister whom he never knew joins the household, Finn takes her under his wing over an everlasting summer on Håøya Island. But he can’t understand why everyone thinks his new sister is so different from every other child. Nor can he fathom his mother’s painful secret, one that pushes them ever farther apart. As summer comes to a close, Finn must attempt to grasp the incomprehensible adult world and his place within it.

Child Wonder is a powerful and unsentimental portrait of childhood. Roy Jacobsen, through the eyes of a child, has produced an immensely uplifting novel that shines with light and warmth.

National Book Award Winners Announced

2011-11-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

The 62nd National Book Awards were held last night, and here are the winners:

Young People's Literature

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai

No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.

For all the ten years of her life, HÀ has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by . . . and the beauty of her very own papaya tree.

But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. HÀ and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, HÀ discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape . . . and the strength of her very own family.
This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

Nonfiction

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Fiction

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.

As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.

Poetry

Head Off and Split by Nikky Finney

The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president s final State of the Union address.Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

Check out the article by Publisher's Weekly.

Live Broadcast Schedule of Miami Book Fair Author Interviews

2011-11-17T10:35:00.000-05:00

The Miami Book Fair International has been going on for the last week (I was sooooo tempted to make the long drive there last weekend!), and there is a list of author interviews going on Saturday, November 19th and Sunday, November 20th. See their website for the schedule.

Introducing...Smonk by Tom Franklin

2011-11-17T10:13:00.000-05:00

Introducing books through the first paragraph or so...

It was the eve of the eve of his death by murder and there was harmonica music on the air when E.O. Smonk rode the disputed mule over the railroad tracks and up the hill to the hotel where his trial would be. It was October the first of that year. It had been dry and dusty for six weeks and five days. The crops were dead. It was Saturday and hot. Ten after three o'clock on the afternoon according to the shadows of the bottles on the bottle tree.

-- Smonk by Tom Franklin

(I'm half-way through this book, and loving it so much that it could definitely become one of my favorite books ever if it keeps this up!)

GIVEAWAY: Because of You by Cathy Maxwell

2011-11-16T17:23:00.000-05:00

Synopsis

Is a reckless rogue worthy of the love of an innocent enchantress?

Pretty Samantha Northrup knows it is her duty to marry—but the chaste English vicar’s daughter secretly desires to be swept off her feet by a man whose kisses leave her breathless. And when a seductive stranger arrives at her door one stormy night, Samantha’s neat and orderly life is turned upside down—especially when she finds herself in a most compromising position . . . and is forced to marry a man she barely knows!

Samantha is unaware that her mystery bridegroom is Yale Carderock, the dashing, disinherited rakehell son of a duke, banished by his father years before. Now Lord Yale has returned—wealthier but only somewhat reformed—and he is bewitched by his lovely new bride’s awakening sensuality and innocent fire. But can this marriage of convenience be something more . . . and can a confirmed cad and society outcast truly change his ways enough to merit the lady’s tender love?

GIVEAWAY: If you love romance, here's your shot to win a copy of Because of You by Cathy Maxwell. See my review here.

Rules (you knew there had to be some):

You must be 18 years or older
Open to US and Canada residents only
To enter, just comment below. Be sure to leave your email address in your comment, or have it visible in your profile.
For extra entries, follow my blog, follow me via Facebook and/or Networked Blogs, and/or blog about this contest. Sidebars are okay. Up to 3 extra entries.
Leave a separate comment for each entry.
That's a total of 4 possible entries!
Those who don't follow the rules risk being disqualified.

Deadline is November 30, 2011

Good Luck! Ready, Set, Go!

ARTICLE: "100 Best First Lines of Novels"

2011-11-16T14:04:00.002-05:00

As stated on infoplease.com...

The editors of American Book Review selected what they consider the most memorable first lines of novels. The titles on the list span centuries and genres and include classics and contemporary novels that are certain to become classics.

Here are a few of my favorites from the selected 100:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The Good Soldier by For Madox Ford

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man."

The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein

"Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.'”

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish

"Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation."

The Crow Road by Iain M. Banks

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

Tracks by Louise Erdrich

"We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall."

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

"A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'”

A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

"Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law."

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Check out the list of 100 books in its entirety. Awesome!

ARTICLE: "The 50 Best Literary Put-Downs"

2011-11-15T18:00:00.001-05:00

Stylist.co.uk has put together a list of the 50 "snarkiest jibes in literature". Here are a select few:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

"Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the garbles, if you have any garbles, you eunuch jelly thou."

My Booky Wook by Russell Brand

"I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!"

After Claude by Iris Owens

"If looks could kill, you'd soon find out that yours couldn't."

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

"It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

"She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me"

The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell

"He is simply a hole in the air."

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

"Any woman who counts on her face is a fool."

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

"Everything people do that doesn't work has to be somebody else's fault. Next time you know, geezers'll be suing the government for getting old and kids'll be taking their mommies to court because they come out ugly."

Hannibal by Thomas Harris

"On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife."

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

"All morons hate it when you call them a moron."

See all 50 "put downs" on their website.

ARTICLE: "A new theory on the death of Jane Austen"

2011-11-15T16:08:00.000-05:00

For all the Jane Austen fans out there, an article on Yahoo! News suggests a new theory on how the beloved author died. The theory involves arsenic, and you can learn more here.

REVIEW: Because of You by Cathy Maxwell

2011-11-15T15:37:00.002-05:00

Synopsis

Is a reckless rogue worthy of the love of an innocent enchantress?

Pub. Date: February 1999
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Format: Mass Market Paperback , 384pp
Series: Avon Romantic Treasure Series
ISBN-13: 9780380797103
ISBN: 0380797100

About the Author

Born in Olathe, Kansas, Cathy Maxwell’s family roots go back to the Mayflower and the Revolutionary War. She has long called Virginia home, noting she is “a Virginian by choice, but a Kansan by nature.” She worked in television news as a broadcaster before spending six years in the Navy. She attended Air Force intelligence school, worked in the Pentagon and did a tour with Naval Intelligence. Cathy began her writing career in 1991 while her children were still small. “It wasn’t easy,” she says. “I worked full time, my husband travelled, we had three kids, I volunteered and I was writing from four until seven every morning.” Now, twenty years later, she is the author of seventeen national bestsellers and her novels appear regularly on The New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. A rarity in the book world, Cathy has published every one of her novels with the same publisher, Harper Collins/Avon Books.

Q&A with Cathy Maxwell

Q: Do you remember the first Regency historical you read? What was it?

A: Faro’s Daughter by Georgette Heyer. I was hooked. Heyer is still one of my favorite writers.

Q: Do you have favorite historical literary devices (forced marriage, heroine posing as boy...? What are they? Can you link any of them to novels you have written?

A: I use the marriage of convenience quite often. First, a book doesn’t have the time to go through a whole courtship, but also how many of us truly “know” the person we marry? You can date someone for years, even live with that person—and discover you don’t know each other at all once you marry. I haven’t figured out why, but marriage really does change everything. Sometimes it is perspective, sometimes expectations. All I know is that after I married, I started cooking casseroles—something I’d never done before marriage!

Q: What do you most want readers to take away from BECAUSE OF YOU?

A: BECAUSE OF YOU is my take of the Prodigal Son. The Biblical Son was lucky his father was alive when he returned. Yale was not so fortunate. I marvel at how easily we assume others will be there for when we need them. The truth is, we only pass this way once and must treat each day as unique. There is no time for grudges or misunderstandings. What Yale must learn over the course of the book is to forgive himself for not reconciling with his father.

Q: Besides all being Regency era historicals, are there aspects of your books that repeat themselves?

A: Besides, of course, strong relationships, great dialogue and a happy ending. My female characters share a common trait—they are not happy with their lives and they realize if there is to be change, it is up to them. I believe each of us has the power to make our lives better if we are willing to toss expectations to the wind and seize living with everything we have.

Q: What kind of research do you do for your novels?

A: I have a super research library that I rely on and that I delve into again and again. However, the point of a romance is not the history. It’s the dynamic between two people who are falling in love—and that has never changed whether we are talking about ancient Rome or light years into the future.

Q: All the talk about ebooks and the end of the mass market paperback makes it hard to know what to expect to happen within the romance genre. What do you think?

A: I think romance is in a heyday. So many choices. So many wonderful reads. And with many authors releasing their backlist titles as ebooks, there’s even more opportunity to enjoy favorite writers.

Q: What are you working on?

A: I’m working on a trilogy involving an ancient curse and the family it is determined to destroy.

Q: Can you tell us what we should look for from you in stores in 2012?

A: The first book of the trilogy LYON’S BRIDE will be out in May. The second book in November. I’m so excited about these characters and their stories. Also, Avon Books will re-release one of my classics, When Dreams Come True on March 27. Please check in at www.cathymaxwell.com for updates.

Q: Please recommend a few books for my winter reading list?

A: Grab a copy of Princess Charming by Nicole Jordan. Wonderful read! It will be out February 2012. You can’t go wrong with a book by any of my fellow Avon authors. I did break down and buy The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan that has been on the bestseller lists for so long. It’s an e-book and a good read.

Q:How will you be celebrating this Thanksgiving?

A: Cooking and writing! Two of my children, the Coast Guard officer and her husband, and my son the college student, will be here along with their friends. Should be a grand time and exactly the sort of day Thanksgiving was meant to be.

Find Cathy Maxwell on Facebook
Check out the author's website

My Thoughts

Town/Location:

Northumberland and London, England. A small portion of the book took place in Ceylon, which I learned is now known as Sri Lanka. This image was taken of an estate in Ceylon, about 80 or so years after the timeline in the book.

Tea estate bungalow, Ceylon, late 1800s

First line:

The persistent banging woke Samantha Northrup from a sound sleep.

Samantha Northrup is the daughter of the old vicar, now deceased, and considered the town "spinster", unmarried at twenty-six. She's found herself at a crossroads in her life, and then enters Yale Carderock. Brash and handsome, the mysterious stranger finds himself directing the path that Samantha chooses, and her life is thrown into a tumult.

It’s been awhile since I have read a romance novel, and it’s been awhile since I’ve read a mass paperback, and I realized one of the things that I love about both-- they are a fast read! I am such a slow reader, reading in short bursts, so books commonly take 2-3 weeks for me to get through them. But a book like this has less text per page and easily readable content and dialogue to absorb, so I fly through the book! It was a light escapist read, and just what I needed right now!

The characters were likable, and there was adequate character development. I was left with a good feel for each of them, and their actions and behavior felt appropriate to what I knew of their character.

The main issue I had with the book was that there were several moments that I felt were unrealistic, and it went beyond me simply being a little jaded when it comes to romance. The moments felt “cheesy” with romance, or seemed highly unlikely to have occurred as depicted in the culture and era as it was supposed to have occurred. But, all things considered, I still enjoyed the story. It touched me emotionally, as I “boo-hooed” countless times throughout the course of the story, and the characters were likable.

My other issue was that, although I don’t read much romance, when I do I like a more complex storyline. The romance novels that I’ve enjoyed most have included mysterious side stories with murders and kidnappings and love triangles. They have kept me guessing, with little surprises in the endings.This story was lacking that complexity. While I don’t remember ever actually being bored, I found the storyline to be predictable and mostly uneventful.

My final word: A simple story with light moments of wit, intermingled with heavier moments of emotion and romance, this was a comfortable “medium” romance. A great escape!

My Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosure:

I received a copy of this book to review from Joan Schulhafer Publishing & Media Consulting, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel.

Mailbox Monday (11-14-11 edition)

2011-11-14T15:17:00.000-05:00

Image licensed from bigstockphoto.com

Mailbox Monday is now hosted monthly by a different blog. Here is the official blog of Mailbox Monday. Here is what I received last week:

So Near by Liza Gyllenhaal
Won from Life in the Thumb

In the aftermath of a devastating loss, Cal and Jenny Horigan's marriage is unraveling. Both are plagued by guilt, unable to seek comfort from one another. Burdened by remorse, they begin to lose sight of the love that once anchored them-together with their sense of right and wrong.

As the Horigans try different ways to deal with their pain, a new acquaintance seems to offer the support they desperately need-though at times they are unsure whether his guidance is leading them back to each other or further apart...

Say Not What If by Andrew Friedman
Received for review from the author

"Say Not What If" is a nearly 10,000 word story written as a long rhyming poem. I have never seen a story written in this format. It has characters and dialogue just like a regular story, and is extremely easy to read and understand, regardless of whether you have a GED or a PHD. You can read it in about an hour, so it doesn't require a lot of time.

“Say Not What If” is about a man on death row, and has as its theme the concept that time is our most valuable commodity. As someone once said, “waste anything but time, because we really are promised no tomorrows.” This theme is explored through the life of a man who sacrifices his marriage and everything else for his career. He realizes much too late the terrible consequences of this decision, and then desperately tries to regain those lost years by making a much worse choice. The resolution of this latter choice involves an additional examination of the concepts of accountability and responsibility, redemption, and the morality of the death penalty.

Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum
Won from NY Journal of Books

Wayne Koestenbaum considers the meaning of humiliation in this eloquent work of cultural critique and personal reflection.

The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled with scarlet-letter moments when their dirty laundry sees daylight. In these moments we not only witness the reversibility of “success,” of prominence, but also come to visceral terms with our own vulnerable selves. We can’t stop watching the scene of shame, identifying with it and absorbing its nearness, and relishing our imagined immunity from its stain, even as we acknowledge the universal, embarrassing predicament of living in our own bodies. With an unusual, disarming blend of autobiography and cultural commentary, noted poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum takes us through a spectrum of mortifying circumstances—in history, literature, art, current events, music, film, and his own life. His generous disclosures and brilliant observations go beyond prurience to create a poetics of abasement. Inventive, poignant, erudite, and playful, Humiliation plunges into one of the most disquieting of human experiences, with reflections at once emboldening and humane.

Books that I purchased from Barnes and Noble:

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger's spectacularly compelling second novel opens with a letter that alters the fate of every character. Julia and Valentina Poole are semi-normal American twenty-year-olds with seemingly little interest in college or finding jobs. Their attachment to one another is intense. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. From a London solicitor, the enclosed letter informs Valentina and Julia that their English aunt Elspeth Noblin, whom they never knew, has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions to this inheritance: that they live in it for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the estranged Elspeth and Edie, their mother.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast and ornate Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, Stella Gibbons and Karl Marx are buried. Julia and Valentina come to know the living residents of their building. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword-puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive compulsive disorder; Marijke, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including - perhaps - their aunt.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Lily Casey Smith, this novel's feisty Texas protagonist, is a frontier teacher, a rancher, a rodeo rider, a poker player, and bootlegger. In Half Broke Horses, she survives droughts, tornados, floods, poverty, and whatever else fate can throw against her. Based on author Jeannette Walls's grandmother, Lily is a plausible character because she has a voice that synchronizes with her history. This novel lives up to the still gathering acclaim for Walls's novel The Glass Castle.

Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way by Dan Buettner

What makes us happy? It's not wealth, youth, beauty, or intelligence, says Dan Buettner. In fact, most of us have the keys within our grasp. Circling the globe to study the world's happiest populations, Buettner has spotted several common principles that can unlock the doors to true contentment with our lives.

Working with leading researchers, Buettner identifies the happiest region on each of four continents. He explores why these populations say they are happier than anyone else, and what they can teach the rest of us about finding contentment. His conclusions debunk some commonly believed myths: Are people who have children happier than those who don't? Not necessarily—in Western societies, parenthood actually makes the happiness level drop. Is gender equality a factor? Are the world's happiest places to be found on tropical islands with beautiful beaches? You may be surprised at what Buettner's research indicates.

Unraveling the story of each "hotspot" like a good mystery, Buettner reveals how he discovered each location and then travels to meet folks who embody each particular brand of happiness. He introduces content, thriving people in Denmark, in Singapore, in northeastern Mexico, and in a composite "happiest place in America." In addition, he interviews economists, psychologists, sociologists, politicians, writers, and other experts to get at what contributes to each region's happiness.

Buettner's findings result in a credible, cross-cultural formula and a practical plan to help us stack the deck for happiness and get more satisfaction out of life. According to Buettner's advisory team, the average person can control about forty percent of his or her individual happiness by optimizing life choices. These aren't unreasonable demands on a person's lifestyle, and they often require only slight changes. They fall into three categories that make up the way we live our lives: the food we eat, the way we exercise, and the social networks we foster. It's all about nourishing the body and the spirit. Heeding the secrets of the world's happiness all-stars can help us make the right choices to find more contentment in our own lives and learn how to thrive.

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (11-12-11 edition)

2011-11-12T09:24:00.001-05:00

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Strangers on Montagu Street. Deadline is December 3. US/Canada only.

Fantasy's Ink is giving away your choice out of fifteens books. Deadline is December 8. International!

Books Like Stars is having a massive "Debut Author" giveaway! US only.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

REVIEW: Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore

2011-11-10T10:10:00.007-05:00

Synopsis

Meet Denver, a man raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana in the 1960s; a man who escaped, hopping a train to wander, homeless, for eighteen years on the streets of Dallas, Texas. No longer a slave, Denver's life was still hopeless-until God moved. First came a godly woman who prayed, listened, and obeyed. And then came her husband, Ron, an international arts dealer at home in a world of Armani-suited millionaires. And then they all came together.

But slavery takes many forms. Deborah discovers that she has cancer. In the face of possible death, she charges her husband to rescue Denver. Who will be saved, and who will be lost? What is the future for these unlikely three? What is God doing?

Same Kind of Different As Me is the emotional tale of their story: a telling of pain and laughter, doubt and tears, dug out between the bondages of this earth and the free possibility of heaven. No reader or listener will ever forget it.

Pub. Date: March 2008
Publisher: Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Format: Paperback , 256pp
ISBN-13: 9780849919107
ISBN: 084991910X

About the Authors

from the book's website

DENVER MOORE'S BIOGRAPHY

Denver was born in rural Louisiana in January 1937, and after several tragic events went to live on a plantation in Red River Parish with his Uncle James and Aunt Ethel, who were share croppers.

Sometime around 1960, he hopped a freight train and began a life as a homeless drifter until 1966 when a judge awarded him a 10 year contract for hard labor at the Louisiana State School of Fools, aka, Angola Prison!

According to Denver, he went in a man and left a man and received a standing ovation from prisoners in the yard as he walked out of there in 1976. For the next 22 years he was homeless on the streets of Fort Worth, Texas. However, there were a few times after a brush with the law, he'd ride the rails visiting cities and hobo jungles across America, sampling regional cuisine like Vienna sausage with fellow passengers.

In 1998, "He never met Miss Debbie," Miss Debbie met him and his life was changed forever.

Today, he is an artist, public speaker, and volunteer for homeless causes. In 2006, as evidence of the complete turn around of his life, the citizens of Fort Worth honored him as "Philanthropist of the Year" for his work with homeless people at the Union Gospel Mission.

To view Denver's artwork, check out his gallery

RON HALL'S BIOGRAPHY

While my daddy was fightin´ the big war in the Pacific, my grandmother delivered me in the farmhouse kitchen near Blooming Grove, Texas, in September 1945. This was back in those days when country girls knew about birthin´ babies and lucky for me, because my granddaddy and the town doctor were on the bucket brigade of a barn fire that night. I grew up in the bed of my granddad's Chevy pickup till it was time to go to school.

My first grade teacher was an old maid named Miss Ellis at Riverside Elementary in Fort Worth who taught me to write and draw square houses with stick figures. Unfortunately, the school was torn down about 30 years ago to make way for a new 7-11. And that's a cryin´ shame because lots of folks have inquired it they could visit if and see the red brick wall where my 2nd grade teacher, Miss Poe, made me stick my nose in that chalk circle.

In the third grade, showing signs of talent, my momma curled my hair with a "Toni Home Permanent" and took me to an audition for the Texas Boys Choir. I made the soprano section, singing in shopping centers and county fairs for three years, until the director saw a whisker on my chin, and my voice moved south of the range for choirboys. During that time however, I managed to win "runner up" in the Browning Heights Elementary talent show by singing a rendition of Snookie Lanson's "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane."

The next year, my first original creation was a football mum fashioned from chrysanthemums I picked from our yard, adding glitter and streamers for my fourth grade cheerleader sweetheart. That was the only day I ever got to play halfback on a football team.

By the fifth grade I began to excel at dancing and racing on roller skates continuing for years, winning trophies and colored ribbons until I traded in my skates at age 14 for the down payment on a ‘55 Chevy convertible. At fifteen I was singing in a rock band playing at local VFW halls performing hits like "Mack the Knife" and "Scotch and Soda" for $5 a night. Continuing to explore all the talents God had given me (and several He did not), I started riding bulls until my nerve failed me when the chute gate opened. Next I took up boxing until a Lena Pope Home orphan named Jeff Perez beat me within an inch of my life in the Golden Gloves tournament.

Graduating from TCU, I managed to avoid classes on art, literature, or creative writing while pursuing Tri-Deltas and fraternity parties which made my resume prime for the job of Private in Uncle Sam's Army. With a little smooth talkin´ I landed a job in Colorado as a TOP SECRET nuclear weapons inspector! Using all the skills I learned in the Army, back in Fort Worth I landed a job selling Campbell soup. I dusted off Tomato Soup cans for $500 per month,   while Andy Warhol made millions in New York painting them! In 1969, I married Deborah Short, my college sweetheart, who was embarrassed by the feather duster I had to carry in my back pocket, so I quit and got an MBA to become a municipal bond trader at the local bank.

In 1971, in Houston on a mission to buy water and sewer bonds for my bank, I happened on an art gallery where I bought my first original oil painting.   Eighty-nine days later, under pressure, I sold it for a $2,000 profit, accidentally launching my art career. Actually, Debbie threatened to divorce me after finding out that I bought it on a 90 day loan by pledging the 50 shares of Ford stock her daddy gave her for a graduation present. I used the entire profit to smooth her ruffled feathers with diamonds and furs!

After twenty-five years I put art on the back burner to chase my dream of being a cowboy. My days were filled with ranching, team roping, cowboy poetry and anything else Debbie asked me to do, like being Denver's friend.   After her death in November 2000, and unable to sleep, I began writing the book and making sculpture. I would stay up writing all night, and when writer's block set in I would fashion tiny sculptures from card board, Post-it-Notes, straight pins, Elmer's glue and paper clips. One day I took these to a welding shop near the ranch and with the help of a real welder began making them into large steel sculptures, "yard art" as my cowboy friends like to call it.

But with the success of our book Same Kind of Different as Me, I no longer find time for welding, selling or anything else but carrying Debbie's torch to cities all across America and playin´ with grand kids who have tagged me "Rocky Pop."

And thanks to folks from coast to coast the books are selling as fast as we can print them. That's the good news. However, most of the sculptures haven't found a home so they dot the landscape at Rocky Top providing buzzard roosts until the Sierra Club finds them unnatural and demands their removal.

Find them on Facebook
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Check out their website

My Thoughts

Town/Location:

Most of the story takes place across areas of Louisiana and Texas,with contrasting scenes of poverty and lavish wealth.

The Hall's Rocky Top homestead in Texas (from their website)

Denver was raised a black youth in abject poverty in the heart of Louisiana's sharecropping community, growing himself into a sharecropper as a young man, as he knew nothing else, before one day escaping into homelessness and what he surprisingly views as a better life than what he's previously known, because at least he is free and no longer a "modern day slave".

But you go on down to Louisiana right now, and take a drive on down the back roads in Red River Parish, and you might be able to see how a colored man that couldn’t read and didn’t have no radio, no car, no telephone, and not even ‘lectricity might fall through a crack in time and get stuck, like a clock that done wound down and quit. (Denver Moore, page 64)

Sometimes it’s drinkin or druggin that lands a man on the streets. And if he ain’t drinkin or druggin already, most fellas like me start in once we get there. It ain’t to have fun. It’s to have less misery. To try and forget that no matter how many “partners in crime” we might hook up with on the street, we is still alone. (Denver Moore, page 73)

Denver Moore in a Louisiana cotton field (from their website)

Ron is a successful art dealer living the American dream with a beautiful wife who has a heart of gold. While Ron and his wife Debbie are volunteering at a homeless shelter, Debbie determines that Ron needs to befriend the irascible and anti-social Denver. It takes some time, but eventually a friendship is born, shortly before heartbreak befalls them all.

Debbie is portrayed in the book nothing short of a saint. She is selfless, God-fearing (and God-loving), patient, compassionate and kind. Based on a dream she had (which she views as a vision from God), she pushes Ron to befriend Denver. Once Ron begins to build a relationship with Denver, he finally broaches the idea of he and Denver becoming "friends", to which follows a lovely moment when Denver shares his concerns over how white people practice "catch and release" when they go fishing, and he doesn't wish to be "caught and released" like one of those fish. Ron commits to keep Denver if he can catch him, and over the years their friendship grows into brotherhood.

As their friendship builds, Ron is repeatedly struck by the small town wisdom of this illiterate sharecropper/homeless man.

...I laid my key ring on the table between us at one of our earliest meetings for coffee.

Denver smiled a bit and sidled up to a cautious question. "I know it ain't none of my business, but does you own somethin that each one of them keys fits?"

I glanced at the keys; there were about ten of them. "I suppose," I replied, not really ever having thought about it.

"Are you sure you own them, or does they own you?" (Ron Hall, Pages 112-113)

I love the book's cover, which shows Denver standing by a railroad crossing sign, located near the tracks where he hopped aboard a freight train leaving Louisiana, but also indicative of being “from the other side of the tracks”. The font looks handwritten, the paper appears aged and stained. I felt it was perfectly matched to this story.

This book is 235 pages and 67 short chapters, which is how I prefer it. I only get to read is bursts, and I always appreciate having a good stopping point every few to a dozen pages. It also includes a Readers Guide, an Interview with the Authors, and a few pages of pictures.

My final word: This book was moving and inspiring, and well-suited for those interested in spiritual and inspirational stories, as well as those fond of memoirs. It goes beyond the trappings of life to the heart of the matter, and is proof that two people can move beyond societal lines to forge a lasting friendship that can weather any storm. And behind it all is a humble woman-- small of frame and great of spirit.

Ron and Denver, friends forever (from their website)

Deborah's last Christmas (from their website)

My Rating: 8 out of 10

New Release: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

2011-11-08T13:30:00.001-05:00

Stephen King's latest book is in stores today! Have you already read it or pre-ordered it?

11/22/63 by Stephen King

November 22nd, 1963 was a rapid-fire sequence of indelible moments: Shots ring out; a president slumped over; a race to the Dallas hospital; an announcement, blood still fresh on the First Lady's dress. But what if President John F. Kennedy didn't have to die; if somehow his assassin could have been thwarted? For Maine schoolteacher Jake Epping, those hypothetical what if's become real possibilities when he walks through a portal to the past. Without special skills and still unfamiliar with his new/old surroundings, he struggles to discover a way to change the history he left. Like its Under the Dome predecessor, Stephen King's 960-page novel shows that this master of suspense is back at the top of his game.

Check out the official website.

Teaser Tuesdays (11-08-11 edition)

2011-11-08T08:10:00.000-05:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today's Teaser:

Carson grew up a kid with a big heart, one always tuned toward God. We loved his little-boy sayings, like the one he used to describe feeling extra tired. "Mommy," he'd say, "I ran out of strong."

-- Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore (page 66)

Barnes & Noble Debuts New Nook

2011-11-07T15:07:00.000-05:00

Barnes & Noble had a press release this morning regarding the release of their new NOOK Tablet for $249! The older NOOK Color has been reduced in price to $200, and the old NOOK Simple Touch is now only $99! Check it out!

Publisher's Weekly Best Books of 2011

2011-11-07T11:51:00.000-05:00

Publisher's Weekly has posted their choices for the best books of 2011, and below are some standouts for me. A couple were already on my "Wish List", but I've included a half dozen new books added to my list:

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson

From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.

Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.

We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities.

Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend.

We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and died squalidly and alone in a Miami women’s jail. He was the son Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt. Hendrickson’s bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives against the complicated, powerful emotions swirling around them. As Hendrickson writes, “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty.”

Hemingway’s Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living–and whom he does it for.

With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters–losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life–and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

The Call by Yannick Murphy

The daily rhythm of a veterinarian’s family in rural New England is shaken when a hunting accident leaves their eldest son in a coma. With the lives of his loved ones unhinged, the veterinarian struggles to maintain stability while searching for the man responsible. But in the midst of their great trial an unexpected visitor arrives, requesting a favor that will have profound consequences—testing a loving father’s patience, humor, and resolve and forcing husband and wife to come to terms with what “family” truly means.

The Call is a gift from one of the most talented and extraordinary voices in contemporary fiction—a unique and heartfelt portrait of a family, poignant and rich in humor and imagination.

I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck

Throughout Lily Tuck’s career, she's been praised by critics for her crisp, lean language and sensuous explorations of exotic locales and complex psychologies. From Siam to Paraguay and beyond, Tuck inspires readers to travel into unfamiliar realms, and her newest novel is no exception. Slender, potent, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness combines marriage, mathematics, and the probability of an afterlife to create Tuck's most affecting and riveting book yet.

“His hand is growing cold, still she holds it” is how this novel that tells the story of a marriage begins. The tale unfolds over a single night as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Still too shocked to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long union, beginning with their meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician—a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As we move through select memories—real and imagined—Tuck reveals the most private intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that defined Nina and Philip's life together.

After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh

In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague.

Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of a Story Prize finalist collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, and four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner China Mountain Zhang and New York Times editor's choice Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.

Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir by Margaux Fragoso

One summer day, Margaux Fragoso meets Peter Curran at the neighborhood swimming pool, and they begin to play. She is seven; he is fifty-one. When Peter invites her and her mother to his house, the little girl finds a child’s paradise of exotic pets and an elaborate backyard garden. Her mother, beset by mental illness and overwhelmed by caring for Margaux, is grateful for the attention Peter lavishes on her, and he creates an imaginative universe for her, much as Lewis Carroll did for his real-life Alice.

In time, he insidiously takes on the role of Margaux’s playmate, father, and lover. Charming and manipulative, Peter burrows into every aspect of Margaux’s life and transforms her from a child fizzing with imagination and affection into a brainwashed young woman on the verge of suicide. But when she is twenty-two, it is Peter—ill, and wracked with guilt—who kills himself, at the age of sixty-six.

Told with lyricism, depth, and mesmerizing clarity, Tiger, Tiger vividly illustrates the healing power of memory and disclosure. This extraordinary memoir is an unprecedented glimpse into the psyche of a young girl in free fall and conveys to readers—including parents and survivors of abuse—just how completely a pedophile enchants his victim and binds her to him.

Check out the full list of 100 books on their website.

Mailbox Monday (11-07-11 edition)

2011-11-07T07:31:00.000-05:00

Image licensed from bigstockphoto.com

Mailbox Monday is now hosted monthly by a different blog. Here is the official blog of Mailbox Monday. Here is what I received over the last couple of weeks:

Little Black Dress by Susan McBride
Won from 2 Kids and Tired Books

Two sisters whose lives seemed forever intertwined are torn apart when a magical little black dress gives each one a glimpse of an unavoidable future.

Antonia Ashton has worked hard to build a thriving career and a committed relationship, but she realizes her life has gone off-track. Forced to return home to Blue Hills when her mother, Evie, suffers a massive stroke, Toni finds the old Victorian where she grew up as crammed full of secrets as it is with clutter.

Now she must put her mother’s house in order—and uncover long-buried truths about Evie and her aunt, Anna, who vanished fifty years earlier on the eve of her wedding. By shedding light on the past, Toni illuminates her own mistakes and learns the most unexpected things about love, magic, and a little black dress with the power to break hearts...and mend them.

Ivan and Misha: A Novel in Stories by Michael Alenyikov
Won from Take Me Away

In lvan and Misha, Michael Alenyikov portrays the complexities of love, sexuality, and the bonds of family with boldness and lyric sensitivity. As the Soviet Union collapses, two young brothers are whisked away from Kiev by their father to start lite anew in America. The intricately linked stories in this powerful debut, set in New York City at the turn of the millennium, swirl about the uneasy bond between fraternal twins, Ivan and Misha, devoted brothers who could not be more different: Bipolar Ivan, like their father, is a natural seducer, a gambler who always has a scheme afoot between fares in his cab and stints in Bellevue. Misha struggles to create a sense of family with his quixotic boyfriend. Smith, his wildly unpredictable brother, and their father, Lyov ("Call me Louie!"), marooned in Brighton Beach yet ever the ladies' man. Father and sons are each haunted by the death of Sonya, a wife to Lyov, a mother to his sons. An evocative and frank exploration of identity, loss, dislocation, and desire, Ivan and Misha marks the arrival of a uniquely gifted voice in American fiction.

The Legacy by Katherine Webb
Won from Peeking Between the Pages

When they were children, Erica Calcott and her sister, Beth, spent their summer holidays at Storton Manor. Now, following the death of their grandmother, they have returned to the grand, imposing house in Wiltshire, England. Unable to stem the tide of childhood memories that arise as she sorts through her grandmother’s belongings, Erica thinks back to the summer her cousin Henry vanished mysteriously from the estate, an event that tore their family to pieces. It is time, she believes, to lay the past to rest, bring her sister some peace, and finally solve the mystery of her cousin’s disappearance.

But sifting through remnants of a bygone time is bringing a secret family history to light—one that stretches back over a century, to a beautiful society heiress in Oklahoma, a haunting, savage land across the ocean. And as past and present converge, Erica and Beth must come to terms with two shocking acts of betrayal . . . and the heartbreaking legacy they left behind.

Because of You by Cathy Maxwell
Received for review from Joan Schulhafer Publishing and Media Consulting

Is a reckless rogue worthy of the love of an innocent enchantress?

Pretty Samantha Northrup knows it is her duty to marry—but the chaste English vicar’s daughter secretly desires to be swept off her feet by a man whose kisses leave her breathless. And when a seductive stranger arrives at her door one stormy night, Samantha’s neat and orderly life is turned upside down—especially when she finds herself in a most compromising position . . . and is forced to marry a man she barely knows!

Samantha is unaware that her mystery bridegroom is Yale Carderock, the dashing, disinherited rakehell son of a duke, banished by his father years before. Now Lord Yale has returned—wealthier but only somewhat reformed—and he is bewitched by his lovely new bride’s awakening sensuality and innocent fire. But can this marriage of convenience be something more . . . and can a confirmed cad and society outcast truly change his ways enough to merit the lady’s tender love?

Bought for myself from Barnes and Noble:

Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way by Dan Buettner

What makes us happy? It's not wealth, youth, beauty, or intelligence, says Dan Buettner. In fact, most of us have the keys within our grasp. Circling the globe to study the world's happiest populations, Buettner has spotted several common principles that can unlock the doors to true contentment with our lives.

Working with leading researchers, Buettner identifies the happiest region on each of four continents. He explores why these populations say they are happier than anyone else, and what they can teach the rest of us about finding contentment. His conclusions debunk some commonly believed myths: Are people who have children happier than those who don't? Not necessarily—in Western societies, parenthood actually makes the happiness level drop. Is gender equality a factor? Are the world's happiest places to be found on tropical islands with beautiful beaches? You may be surprised at what Buettner's research indicates.

Unraveling the story of each "hotspot" like a good mystery, Buettner reveals how he discovered each location and then travels to meet folks who embody each particular brand of happiness. He introduces content, thriving people in Denmark, in Singapore, in northeastern Mexico, and in a composite "happiest place in America." In addition, he interviews economists, psychologists, sociologists, politicians, writers, and other experts to get at what contributes to each region's happiness.

Buettner's findings result in a credible, cross-cultural formula and a practical plan to help us stack the deck for happiness and get more satisfaction out of life. According to Buettner's advisory team, the average person can control about forty percent of his or her individual happiness by optimizing life choices. These aren't unreasonable demands on a person's lifestyle, and they often require only slight changes. They fall into three categories that make up the way we live our lives: the food we eat, the way we exercise, and the social networks we foster. It's all about nourishing the body and the spirit. Heeding the secrets of the world's happiness all-stars can help us make the right choices to find more contentment in our own lives and learn how to thrive.

The Accidental Vegetarian by Simon Rimmer

When Simon Rimmer bought a small vegetarian restaurant, he had no idea how to cook. Armed with two cookbooks and heaps of enthusiasm, he and a friend created the best vegetarian restaurant in Manchester, famous for its unusual food and lovely atmosphere. A confirmed meat eater, Simon had to rethink his cooking and has created vegetarian recipes to please even the most dedicated carnivore. This book is a collection of some of his recipes that are quick to prepare but totally delicious. From his more exotic fusion creations to good old favourites. The Accidental Vegetarian will kill the lentil and sandal image of vegetarianism forever!

2nd Annual Happy Haul-idays from Chronicle Books

2011-11-06T23:41:00.006-05:00

It's the 2nd Annual "Happy Haul-idays from Chronicle Books"! What's that mean to you? If you are a blogger, write a post listing $500 worth of books from Chronicle Books that you would like to win. If you are picked as their winning blogger, you get the list of books that you posted! Not only that, but you then get to choose a commenter on your blog post to win the same haul of books. AND you then get to choose a charity of your choice to win a third set of books as well! How awesome is that?

And to make it even better, you get to comment on any other blogger's post in hopes that you may win that way if THEY are the grand winner instead! It's a win-win-win, with multiple ways for you to win.

The charity I would choose, should I win, would be the Lee County Library System.

I think the library system is an important fixture in any town, even if I don't go very often (due to me being a bibliophile, who needs to OWN books! :) I never went to the public library as a kid, as my mother never had time to take me, but I wish I had. I did enjoy getting books from the school library though!

Here is my list of books I would like:

A Beautiful Bowl of Soup: The Best Vegetarian Recipes
By Paulette Mitchell   $19.95

Rice Pasta Couscous: The Heart of the Mediterranean Kitchen
By Jeff Koehler $29.95

Fresh from the Farmers' Market: Year-Round Recipes for the Pick of the Crop
By Janet Fletcher, Victoria Pearson, Alice Waters $19.95

Simply Organic: A Cookbook for Sustainable, Seasonal, and Local Ingredients
By Jesse Ziff Cool, France Ruffenach $24.95

Heirloom Beans: Great Recipes for Dips and Spreads, Soups and Stews, Salads and Salsas, and Much More from Rancho Gordo
By Steve Sando, Vanessa Barrington, Sara Remington $22.95

The Commonsense Kitchen: 500 Recipes Plus Lessons for a Hand-Crafted Life
By Tom Hudgens $35

Fast, Fresh and Green: More Than 90 Delicious Recipes for Veggie Lovers
By Susie Middleton, Ben Fink $24.95

Anna Getty's Easy Green Organic: Cook Well—Eat Well—Live Well
By Anna Getty, Dan Goldberg, Ron Hamad $24.95

Michael Chiarello's Bottega
By Michael Chiarello, Frankie Frankeny $40

Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It
By Michael Ableman $35

Saveur The New Comfort Food: Home Cooking From Around the World
From the Editors of Saveur magazine   $35

Quick and Easy Mexican Cooking: More than 80 Everyday Recipes
By Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee,Photographs by Leigh Beisch,and Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee $22.95

Ready, Set, Novel! A Workbook, Plan and Plot Your Upcoming Masterpiece
By Chris Baty, Lindsey Grant, and Tavia Stewart-Streit of National Novel Writing Month   $16.95

Okavango: Africa's Last Eden
$24.95

On This Earth: Photographs from East Africa
By Nick Brandt, Alice Sebold, Jane Goodall $40

Chicken and Egg: A Memoir of Suburban Homesteading with 125 Recipes
By Janice Cole, Alex Farnum $24.95

The Meaning of Trees: Botany • History • Healing • Love
By Fred Hageneder $19.95

From Seed to Skillet: A Guide to Growing, Tending, Harvesting, and Cooking Up Fresh, Healthy Food to Share with People You Love
By Jimmy Williams   $30

Does my list sound good to you, too? If so, comment below, and if I win, maybe you will, too! Go to the Chronicle Books website to sign up for your own chance to win your selection of books. Good luck to us all!

Win Treasure Hunter by W.C. Jameson

2011-11-06T13:25:00.004-05:00

Publicist Stephanie Barko is giving away a copy of Treasure Hunter by W.C. Jameson! This one looks really interesting! As stated on Barko's blog:

Treasure Hunter is one intrepid man’s efforts to find the lost treasures of North America. Jameson and his partners piece together centuries-old histories through documents, maps, and stories passed down from one generation to the next, facing life-threatening danger time and again. These riveting stories, told with humor and candor, are a portal to another time, and are a testament to the spirited independence of risk-takers, a few of whom still exist in what we think of as the modern age.

The giveaway is running through midnight tonight. Enter to win here!

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (11-05-11 edition)

2011-11-05T09:19:00.005-04:00

The Review Broads is giving away 5 copies of Hell and Gone. Deadline is November 8. US only.

Jo-Jo Loves to Read is giving away Everything We Ever Wanted. Deadline is November 10. US/Canada only.

Luxury Reading is giving away 2 copies of Beautiful Chaos. Deadline is November 10. US/Canada only.

Amused by Books is giving away Her Sister's Shadow. Deadline is November 11. US/Canada only.

Book Whore is giving away her 1st edition Nook! Deadline is November 14. I couldn't find a note of whether it was US or International.

The Review Broads is giving away 5 copies of The Outlaw Album. Deadline is November 18. US only.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. Deadline is November 26. US/Canada only.

I am a Reader, Not a Writer is giving away Crossed. Deadline is November 28. US only.

Fantasy's Ink is giving away your choice out of fifteens books. Deadline is December 8. International!

Readaholic is giving away Children of Paranoia. I couldn't find note of a deadline. US/Canada only.

Books Like Stars is having a massive "Debut Author" giveaway! US only.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

I Wanna...The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steve Pinker

2011-11-04T07:31:00.003-04:00

This week's spotlight shines on this book:

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.

Here is an interesting article about this book.

Amazon Launches the "Kindle Owners' Lending Library"

2011-11-03T11:57:00.000-04:00

I personally am not into e-books yet, but this will interest a lot of readers out there. Per an article on CNET:

In an interesting twist on e-book lending that's sure to rile competitors, Amazon has launched the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which allows Amazon Prime members to check out up to one e-book a month for free with no due date.

Check out the article here.

Bookstore Cats

2011-11-03T11:07:00.000-04:00

NYULOCAL has posted a story about the cats that inhabit local NY bookstores:

Kitty Porn: City Bookstores With Cats

Cute story. My local used bookstore, Sandman Book Company, has a resident cat as well.

His name is Kitty-Wan Kenobi. He's a very sweet and friendly guy, and is always laying on the footstool located in the front room whenever I enter, purring up a storm as I approach and relishing any attention I want to give him.

And I love this bookstore, located in Punta Gorda, FL. An independent bookseller, they recently expanded and doubled their store size. I just discovered them earlier this year, and have been back several times now, and may try to make another trip out this weekend.

And as for cats, I know of which I speak...

Shotsie, Delilah, Simon, Momma, Fancy

Those are my five cats. You'll note Shotsie over on the left by herself, because she doesn't like cats-- she likes dogs! Simon and Delilah are brother and sister, and their mother is Momma. Momma was a stray cat at my condo complex, and I discovered one day that she had brought me her babies and left them for me on my balcony, even though she was so timid that she spent the better part of four years hiding under my bed in my bedroom after I took her and the kittens in. You see she is eating next to Fancy, whom tormented her those four years, leaving me to keep Momma locked in my bedroom for her own peace of mind.

But after moving to my house, Momma came out of her shell and now will stand up to Fancy. So the two of them have reached an impasse.

So I have my own resident "library cats", who are habitually trying to sneak into my room that I call "the library"!

Check out the story about the bookstore cats. Cute!

Introducing...Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore

2011-11-03T08:06:00.001-04:00

Introducing a book through the first paragraph or so...

Until Miss Debbie, I'd never spoke to no white woman before. Just answered a few questions, maybe-- it wasn't really speakin. And to me, even that was mighty risky since the last time I was fool enough to open my mouth to a white woman, I wound up half-dead and nearly blind.

Wednesday Writers (11-02-11 edition)

2011-11-02T08:32:00.002-04:00

I've had a story brewing in me for nearly fifteen years. It blossomed in the late '90s, and I've never been able to shake it. The people in the story have become friends and family, and I've decided to finally put pen to paper (or fingers to keys) and get the story out of me. I don't have any intention at this time of trying to publish the story-- just to give it breath. At this point, it is serving as a catharsis, allowing me to finally purge myself of this story that has been building in me. Right now the story is just a skeleton, and I am really learning what it means to "flesh" something out.

But writing has gotten me interested in the "how" of writing. I have been slowly learning, and have seen firsthand just how difficult it is to write "well". I don't write well yet.

This article by Nathan Bransford about "How to Start Writing a Novel" links to two other good articles he wrote about finding your voice and developing a plot. Check it out!

Teaser Tuesdays (11-01-11 edition)

2011-11-01T08:46:00.001-04:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today's Teaser:

Walton used the forward momentum to his advantage, however, and, arms akimbo, pirouetted from the deck and grabbed a lowhanging limb. Those ballet lessons had done a bit of good, after all.

-- Smonk by Tom Franklin, page 65

Wow! All I have to say about this book so far is...Wow! I don't think I've ever read a book so shockingly offensive and crass, and yet entertaining! I've wanted to read this book ever since I discovered that it was a favorite of Alden Bell. I read Alden Bell's book The Reapers are the Angels, and I fell in love with the main character Temple. After learning that Alden loved the book Smonk, I read the book synopsis and could see the influence it had on Alden's own The Reapers are the Angels. I decided almost immediately that I wanted to read it. Wow! I think this one is going to be a wild ride!

Mailbox Monday (10-31-11 edition)

2011-10-31T08:29:00.001-04:00

Image licensed from bigstockphoto.com

Mailbox Monday is now hosted monthly by a different blog. Here is the official blog of Mailbox Monday. Here is what I received over the last number of weeks:

Honored Dead by Joseph Braude
Won from Telly Says

The Arab Islamic world is known for religious extremism, ethnic conflicts, and, now, the overthrow of seemingly unshakable regimes—but if anything has become clear, it’s that our understanding of the region remains shrouded and incomplete. The seeds of revolution, radicalism, and—possibly—reform are buried in the individual stories of millions of people whose lives determine the fates of their societies, people whose motivations are as common, and as strange, as our own.

Here is one of those stories—and the story of how this world is being transformed, one life at a time.

Joseph Braude is the first Western journalist ever to secure embed status with an Arab security force, assigned to a hardened unit of detectives in Casablanca who handle everything from busting al-Qaeda cells to solving homicides. One day he’s given the file for a seemingly commonplace murder: a young guard at a warehouse killed in what appears to be a robbery gone wrong. Braude is intrigued by the details of the case: the sheer brutality of the murder, the identities of the accused—a soldier—and the victim, a shadowy migrant with links to a radical cleric, and the odd location: a warehouse owned by a wealthy member of one of the few thriving Jewish communities in the Arab world. After interviewing the victim’s best friend, who tearfully insists that the true story of the murder has been covered up by powerful interests, Braude commits to getting to the bottom of it.

Braude’s risky pursuit of the shocking truth behind the murder takes him from cosmopolitan Marrakesh to the proud Berber heartland, from the homes of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country to the backstreets of Casablanca, where migrants come to make fortunes, jihad, and trouble, but often end up just trying to survive with dignity. The Honored Dead is a timely and riveting mystery about a society in transition, the power of the truth, and the irrepressible human need for justice.

The Traitor's Wife by Kathleen Kent
Won from Just Another New Blog

This novel was originally published under the title The Wolves of Andover.

In the harsh wilderness of colonial Massachusetts, Martha Allen works as a servant in her cousin's household, taking charge and locking wills with everyone. Thomas Carrier labors for the family and is known both for his immense strength and size and his mysterious past. The two begin a courtship that suits their independent natures, with Thomas slowly revealing the story of the role he played in the English Civil War. But in the rugged new world they inhabit, danger is ever present, whether it be from the assassins sent from London to kill the executioner of Charles I or the wolves-in many forms-who hunt for blood. At once a love story and a tale of courage, The Traitor's Wife confirms Kathleen Kent's ability to craft powerful stories from the dramatic background of America's earliest days.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Won from The Scarlet Letter

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.

As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.

Thanks to all!

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (10-29-11 edition)

2011-10-29T16:52:00.006-04:00

NOTE: A reminder that you are free to email me about any giveaways that you are having, if you want me to blog them, and I'll be happy to try to post them even if I am not entering them. Just include a link to the giveaway, what you are giving away, how many copies are being given away, and the deadline in order to assure being included. Email me at nfmgirl AT gmail DOT com.

Here is a list of some giveaways going on in Blogworld*. Please note that new giveaways that were added this week are indented in Blockquotes:

Passion for Novels is giving away your choice out of three books. Deadline is October 31. International!

Portrait of a Book is giving away your choice out of two books. Deadline is October 31. US only.

Luxury Reading is giving away The Countess. Deadline is October 31. US/Canada only.

The Reading Fish is giving away lots of books and swag for her 200 Follower giveaway! Deadline is October 31.

One a Day YA is giving away your choice out of a group of books. Deadline is October 31. International!

Lost in the View is giving away your choice out of five books. Deadline is October 31. US only.

A Book-lover's Review is giving away Beautiful Chaos. Deadline is October 31. International!

A Book-lover's Review is giving away a huge Scream Bundle! Deadline is October 31. International (although you may have to pay shipping)!

Stuck in Books is giving away your choice of several books. Deadline is October 31. International!

Amused by Books is giving away Holy Ghost Girl. Deadline is November 1. US/Canada only.

Jo-Jo Loves to Read is giving away Everything We Ever Wanted. Deadline is November 10. US/Canada only.

Luxury Reading is giving away 2 copies of Beautiful Chaos. Deadline is November 10. US/Canada only.

Amused by Books is giving away Her Sister's Shadow. Deadline is November 11. US/Canada only.

Book Whore is giving away her 1st edition Nook! Deadline is November 14. I couldn't find a note of whether it was US or International.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. Deadline is November 26. US/Canada only.

Readaholic is giving away Children of Paranoia. I couldn't find note of a deadline. US/Canada only.

Books Like Stars is having a massive "Debut Author" giveaway! US only.

Twitter Doomed

2011-10-28T11:32:00.000-04:00

As if I already didn't have little enough time to read thanks to 10 blogs, 5 cats, a dog, a lovebird, a turtle, a job, a house, Facebook, friends, family, and life in general...*deep breath*... I have now discovered Twitter.

I am doomed...

Hunger Games movie posters released

2011-10-27T13:52:00.000-04:00

Check out these links for the posters and accompanying articles:

Katniss (Yahoo!) – Jennifer Lawrence (This one includes some stills from the movie)

Peeta (MTV) – Josh Hutcherson

Gale (Moviefone) – Liam Hemsworth

Rue (Teen.com) – Amandla Stenberg

Haymitch (IGN) – Woody Harrelson

Cato (MSN) – Alexander Ludwig

Cinna (Fandango) – Lenny Kravitz

Effie (EW) –Elizabeth Banks

Quote of the Day

2011-10-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”

--Fran Lebowitz

The Kama Sutra of Reading

2011-10-26T08:37:00.001-04:00

World Book Night 2012 Launches List of 25 Titles in U.K., U.S. Titles Coming Soon

2011-10-25T22:56:00.000-04:00

Publisher's Weekly ran an article today about World Book Night 2012, which I had never heard of before. The UK has released their list of 25 titles for next year's "celebration of reading", and the US is finalizing their list. Here are the 25 books on the UK list:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Vintage)

The Player of Games by Iain M Banks (Little, Brown)

Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Transworld)

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Harper Collins)

The Take by Martina Cole (Headline)

Harlequin by Bernard Cornwall (Harper Collins)

Someone Like You by Roald Dahl (Penguin)

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Penguin)

Room by Emma Donoghue (Pan Macmillan)

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (Little, Brown)

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)

Misery by Stephen King (Hodder)

The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella (Transworld)

Small Island by Andrea Levy (Headline)

Let the Right One In by John Ajvde Lindqvist (Quercus)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Pan Macmillan)

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Vintage)

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell (Headline)

The Damned Utd by David Peace (Faber)

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (Transworld)

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (Penguin)

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson (Vintage)

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (Vintage)

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak (Transworld)

Readathon Oct 2011: End of Event Meme

2011-10-23T08:15:00.000-04:00

Well, the read-a-thon is over, and I did worse this year than ever! I didn't make it through a single book.

What I did do was get in a lot of hour-long naps!

And I spent time reading and editing my own book that I've been writing!

But as for really reading like I was supposed to be doing? Nope. Wasn't very good at that.

I think part of the problem was that I am currently reading four non-fiction books. And that generally means four "not fun" books. A read-a-thon really needs to have one or two fun and light fiction stories to get lost in, and I was lacking that. I've found myself currently under the obligation to read four non-fiction stories, and while they may be good books in their own right, it can be a little much to sit and just read non-fiction stories constantly. I am really craving a good fiction story right now, but I feel the pressure to get through at least two of these this week. So I am denying myself the fiction story right now. Argh!

Here's my pitiful end-of-the-readathon meme:

Which hour was most daunting for you? It's always the hours after midnight that are the toughest for me.
Could you list a few high-interest books that you think could keep a Reader engaged for next year? Most of the ones I can think of would be really long books, and I think shorter books are a better option for a read-a-thon. All of my books were non-fiction, which aren't a good choice, but those are the books I'm obligated to review right now, so...
Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? Nope. You guys always do great!
What do you think worked really well in this year’s Read-a-thon? I never have any complaints about the way the read-a-thon is run, so nothing in particular stands out.
How many books did you read? Zilch, but I got about halfway through one.... :(
What were the names of the books you read? Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent
Which book did you enjoy most? That would have to be the same one, I guess.
Which did you enjoy least? Uhhhh...
If you were a Cheerleader, do you have any advice for next year’s Cheerleaders? n/a
How likely are you to participate in the Read-a-thon again? What role would you be likely to take next time? I'll read again, and I'll make promises to myself once again that I don't keep!

So we'll see how it goes at the spring read-a-thon. Perhaps I'll do better? I certainly couldn't do worse! I hope everyone enjoyed themselves this year!

Readathon Oct 2011: Zombify Mini-Challenge

2011-10-23T05:12:00.001-04:00

Heidenkind of Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Books is hosting a min-challenge for the read-a-thon.

Her challenge is to have readers "zombify" one of their read-a-thon books. This can be done either by altering the book cover, or by creating an "adaptation synopsis" for the book.

Since it is 5 AM and I am too tired to think too much, I opted to alter my book cover. Heidenkind had suggested using the spooky editing features of Picnik, which was a great idea, but unfortunately those features cost money to use. So I was limited with what features I could use.

However this was what I came up with:

At this time of night, I'm pretty much feeling zombified myself! Now back to it!

Readathon Oct 2011: Mid-Event Survey Mini-Challenge

2011-10-22T20:56:00.000-04:00

Let's just get this out of the way right now: I've done terribly this read-a-thon! I've read very little. Dang technology! It just keeps distracting me!

1. What are you reading right now? Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore
2. How many books have you read so far? zilch
3. What book are you most looking forward to for the second half of the Read-a-thon? I just hope to finish this one!
4. Did you have to make any special arrangements to free up your whole day? Sorta. Just said I'm making no plans with anyone this weekend!
5. Have you had many interruptions? How did you deal with those? Tons of interruptions (I distract myself), and I've dealt with them very poorly!
6. What surprises you most about the Read-a-thon, so far? How little I've read. I mean, I'm always bad with read-a-thons, but this time I'm really pitiful!
7. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? Nope, you guys always do a great job!
8. What would you do differently, as a Reader or a Cheerleader, if you were to do this again next year? Turn off the computer and TV!
9. Are you getting tired yet? I've already taken two naps! So I'm pretty good at the moment.
10. Do you have any tips for other Readers or Cheerleaders, something you think is working well for you that others may not have discovered? Oh, please. I am the last person to ask for tips!

Okay. I promise to get some reading done over the next hour. Really!

Readathon Oct 2011: Book Sentences Mini-Challenge

2011-10-22T16:32:00.001-04:00

Well, we're on Hour 9. I have no idea how we got on hour 9, considering how little reading I've actually gotten in (as usual), but here we are.

Kate over at Midnight Book Girl is hosting a mini-challenge. Use the books on your shelves to build sentences.

I decided to really challenge myself, and limit myself to my "reading next" wall shelves that are located next to my bed:

So this is what I turned up on these two shelves...

A discovery of witches matched the weird sisters leviathan.

The philosophical breakfast club jarred into being the homecoming of Samuel Lake.

First love the passage.

How'd I do? If I'd used all of my bookshelves to try to create sentences, I may have never returned to the read-a-thon! Here's just a few of them...

Good luck to everyone who's joining in on the read-a-thon today! Enjoy!

Readathon Oct 2011: Character Photo Mini-Challenge

2011-10-22T10:48:00.001-04:00

Alyce of At Home with Books is hosting a mini-challenge for this year's Read-a-Thon. She has asked participants to take a photo that represents a character from a book that they are reading.

I've got a number of books that I'm reading right now. However I just realized as I type this that all four books that I'm reading are non-fiction!

One of the books that I'm reading is Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell. So here is my photo:

Unfortunately my seal is at work sitting on a shelf, so his cousin the Navy Manatee is stepping in for him!

Rock on readers!

Readathon Oct 2011: Introduction

2011-10-22T08:22:00.001-04:00

The Read-a-thon has begun, and it's time to introduce ourselves!

1)Where are you reading from today? I'm starting off in bed, but will move to the living room later.

2)Three random facts about me… I have five cats, a dog, bird and turtle. I drive a 12-year-old Jeep Cherokee that I love! I'm a pescatarian (I don't eat meat, but I do eat fish and seafood.)

3)How many books do you have in your TBR pile for the next 24 hours? Four, I think. (Just look on the left sidebar for the majority of them.)

4)Do you have any goals for the read-a-thon (i.e. number of books, number of pages, number of hours, or number of comments on blogs)? I've given up on goals, since I always let myself down. If I could just finish one book and get a good way through another (read, say, 400 pages?)

5)If you’re a veteran read-a-thoner, any advice for people doing this for the first time? I'm the last person to get advice from. I'm terrible at this!

Okay. I'm off to see what's next on the list before I pick up my first book. See? Almost a half-hour into it, and I still haven't picked up a book! I'm terrible at this!

Good luck everyone!

Dewey's 24-Hour Read-a-thon

2011-10-22T08:00:00.002-04:00

It's that time of year-- time for the fall read-a-thon! And I am joining in once again! I think that this is my...third? fourth?...24-hour read-a-thon, and each time I get easier on myself. I used to struggle so hard to stay away 24 hours. But now I kinda figure that the point is to just enjoy reading, and if I am struggling, then I am not doing very well at this!

So I will be reading as much as possible, but when tired I will be sleeping! My biggest goal is to spend more time reading and less time doing mini-challenges. I love the challenges and think they are such fun, but they take so much of my time and I wind up with pitiful reading results!

So, it's off to reading. At last count there were about 442 of us reading today. Good luck to everyone else joining in!

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (10-21-11 edition)

2011-10-21T23:58:00.011-04:00

Amused by Books is having a blogoversary celebration! Deadline is October 27. International!

Savvy Verse and Wit is giving away Her Sister's Shadow. Deadline is October 28. US/Canada only.

Amused by Books is giving away Night Circus. Deadline is October 28. US/Canada only.

Passion for Novels is giving away your choice out of three books. Deadline is October 31. International!

Portrait of a Book is giving away your choice out of two books. Deadline is October 31. US only.

Luxury Reading is giving away The Countess. Deadline is October 31. US/Canada only.

The Reading Fish is giving away lots of books and swag for her 200 Follower giveaway! Deadline is October 31.

One a Day YA is giving away your choice out of a group of books. Deadline is October 31. International!

Lost in the View is giving away your choice out of five books. Deadline is October 31. US only.

Amused by Books is giving away Holy Ghost Girl. Deadline is November 1. US/Canada only.

Jo-Jo Loves to Read is giving away Everything We Ever Wanted. Deadline is November 10. US/Canada only.

Book Whore is giving away her 1st edition Nook! Deadline is November 14. I couldn't find a note of whether it was US or International.

Readaholic is giving away Children of Paranoia. I couldn't find note of a deadline. US/Canada only.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (10-15-11 edition)

2011-10-15T13:24:00.001-04:00

Readaholic is giving away Children of Paranoia. I couldn't find note of a deadline. US/Canada only.

Awesome Stacks of Books

2011-10-11T20:32:00.001-04:00

I saw this today, and was fascinated with looking at all of the stacks of books.

I figured while I was at it, I would drop my pants and show my own shelves. These two cases are simply some of my TBR books that I've acquired over the last couple of years. This doesn't include books read, my 30 or 40 "reading next" books, or any of the books that I brought with me from my last place (most of which are still packed in boxes).

I've always had a problem with my eyes being bigger than my stomach. At least that's what my mother was always telling me growing up, when I'd pile my plate up with food and wind up eating only about half of it. I'm getting better as I get older, but from the look of these bookcases, I still have some work to do!

NPR's list of your Top 100 Science-Fiction/Fantasy Books

2011-10-08T09:44:00.001-04:00

NPR has released Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books. Listed among them are a few of my favorite reads, and a dozen or more of the books are sitting on my shelves waiting To Be Read. Here are my favorites from the list:

1984 by George Orwell

Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell's chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell's narrative is timelier than ever. 1984 presents a startling and haunting vision of the world, so powerful that it is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the power of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of multiple generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions—a legacy that seems only to grow with the passage of time.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Huxley's vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World -- a world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where the people are genetically designed to be passive, consistently useful to the ruling class.

The Stand by Stephen King

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death.

And here is the bleak new world of the day after; a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides — or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abigail — and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers; Randall Flagg, the dark man.

In 1978 Stephen King published The Stand, the novel that is now considered to be one of his finest works. But as it was first published, The Stand was incomplete, since more than 150,000 words had been cut from the original manuscript.

Now Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil has been restored to its entirety. The Stand ; The Complete And Uncut Edition includes more than five hundred pages of material previously deleted, along with new material that King added as he reworked the manuscript for a new generation. It gives us new characters and endows familiar ones with new depths. It has a new beginning and a new ending. What emerges is a gripping work with the scope and moral complexity of a true epic.

For hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King's gift. And those who are reading The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work of the imagination that takes on the issues that will determine our survival.

Book Giveaways in Blogworld (10-08-11 edition)

2011-10-08T09:14:00.000-04:00

NOTE: A reminder that you are free to email me about any giveaways that you are having, if you want me to blog them, and I'll be happy to try to post them even if I am not entering them. Just include a link to the giveaway, what you are giving away, how many copies are being given away, and the deadline in order to assure being included. Email me at nfmgirl AT gmail DOT com.

Here is a list of some giveaways going on in Blogworld*. Please note that new giveaways that were added this week are indented in Blockquotes:

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away Primacy. Deadline is October 8. US/Canada only.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away Falling Together. Deadline is October 8. US/Canada only.

Addicted 2 Novels is giving away 2 boxes of ARCs. Deadline is October 10. US only.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away The Legacy. Deadline is October 15. International!

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away Salvage the Bones. Deadline is October 22. US/Canada only.

Book Whore is giving away her 1st edition Nook! Deadline is November 14. I couldn't find a note of whether it was US or International.

*Courtesy Note: Please keep in mind the many, many hours of work that goes into me compiling this list each week. Please be courteous and thoughtful, and do not steal my text. Either recreate your own list, or link to this list and direct your readers here for giveaway information. Thank you so much for your consideration.

Mailbox Monday (10-3-11 edition)

2011-10-03T11:16:00.001-04:00

Image licensed from bigstockphoto.com

Mailbox Monday is now hosted monthly by a different blog. Here is the official blog of Mailbox Monday. Here is what I received over the last number of weeks:

The Ghost of Greenwich Village by Lorna Graham
Won from Sara's Organized Chaos

In this charming fiction debut, a young woman moves to Manhattan in search of romance and excitement—only to find that her apartment is haunted by the ghost of a cantankerous Beat Generation writer in need of a rather huge favor.

For Eve Weldon, moving to Greenwich Village is a dream come true. She’s following in the bohemian footsteps of her mother, who lived there during the early sixties among a lively community of Beat artists and writers. But when Eve arrives, the only scribe she meets is a grumpy ghost named Donald, and the only writing she manages to do is for chirpy segments on a morning news program, Smell the Coffee. The hypercompetitive network environment is a far cry from the genial camaraderie of her mother’s literary scene, and Eve begins to wonder if the world she sought has faded from existence. But as she struggles to balance her new job, demands from Donald to help him complete his life’s work, a budding friendship with a legendary fashion designer, and a search for clues to her mother’s past, Eve begins to realize that community comes in many forms—and that the true magic of the Village is very much alive, though it may reveal itself in surprising ways.

Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey
Won from Stilleto Storytime

This enthralling confection of a novel, the first in a new trilogy, follows the transformation of a coddled Austrian archduchess into the reckless, powerful, beautiful queen Marie Antoinette.

Why must it be me? I wondered. When I am so clearly inadequate to my destiny?

Raised alongside her numerous brothers and sisters by the formidable empress of Austria, ten-year-old Maria Antonia knew that her idyllic existence would one day be sacrificed to her mother’s political ambitions. What she never anticipated was that the day in question would come so soon.

Before she can journey from sunlit picnics with her sisters in Vienna to the glitter, glamour, and gossip of Versailles, Antonia must change everything about herself in order to be accepted as dauphine of France and the wife of the awkward teenage boy who will one day be Louis XVI. Yet nothing can prepare her for the ingenuity and influence it will take to become queen.

Filled with smart history, treacherous rivalries, lavish clothes, and sparkling jewels, Becoming Marie Antoinette will utterly captivate fiction and history lovers alike.

First Love by Violeta Barrett
This book was received from the author for review. It turns out she is a local author here in town!

By 1956 Violeta Barrett had been working for a Wall Street investment firm more than a decade. Recently separated from her husband and feeling overworked, Violeta decided to vacation in Mexico. After her plane landed in Mexico City, a stranger with a deep, accented voice introduced himself as her tour guide. Violeta and Jorge had no idea they were about to begin a four-year romance that would endure the test of time and distance.

In her compelling memoir, Violeta shares a nostalgic and emotional journey where principles, love, and obligations collide and force unexpected decisions. Energized by the Mexican culture and Jorge's charm, Violeta is soon caught up in the joy of being loved. But before long she must return to her obligations, leaving Jorge behind. Through the more than seventy love letters she would receive from Jorge for the next few years, the two share a forbidden passion-until the forces of morality prevail.

Nearly fifty years ago, Violeta and Jorge fell in love, changing their lives forever. Their heartfelt story proves that true love is not affected by time. It is ageless. It is eternal.

I've also purchased a number of books lately:

People of the Longhouse by W. Michael and Kathleen O'Neal Gear

Born in a time of violent upheaval, young Odion and his little sister, Tutelo, live in fear that one day Yellowtail Village will be attacked. When that day comes and Odion and Tutelo are marched away as slaves, Odion's only hope is that his parents are tracking them, coming to rescue them.

They are. But War Chief Koracoo and Deputy Gonda think they are tracking an ordinary war party herding captive women and children to an enemy village. Instead, they are following close on the heels of legendary evil, an old witch-woman named Gannajero, who captures children for her own purposes.

Lucy by Laurence Gonzales

Primatologist Jenny Lowe is studying bonobo chimpanzees deep in the Congo when she is caught in a deadly civil war that leaves a fellow researcher dead and his daughter, Lucy, orphaned. Realizing that the child has no living relatives, Jenny begins to care for Lucy as her own. But as she reads the late scientist’s notebooks, she discovers that Lucy is the result of a shocking experiment, and that the adorable, magical, wonderful girl she has come to love is an entirely new hybrid species—half human, half bonobo.

Assegai by Wilbur Smith

Wilbur Smith has won acclaim worldwide as the master of the historical novel. Now, in Assegai he takes readers on an unforgettable African adventure set against the gathering clouds of war.

It is 1913 and Leon Courtney, an ex-soldier turned professional hunter in British East Africa, guides the rich and powerful from America and Europe on big-game safaris. Leon had never sought fame, but an expedition alongside U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt has made him one of the most sought-after hunters on the continent. Soon, he finds that with celebrity comes not just wealth—but also danger.

Leon is recruited by his uncle Penrod Ballantyne, commander of the British forces in East Africa, to gather information on one of his clients: Count Otto von Meerbach, a German industrialist whose company builds aircraft and vehicles for the Kaiser’s burgeoning army. While spying, Leon falls desperately in love with von Meerbach’s beautiful and enigmatic mistress, Eva von Wellberg.

On the eve of the World War, Leon stumbles on a plot by Count von Meerbach that could wipe out the British forces in Africa. He finds himself left alone to frustrate von Meerbach’s plan, and in grave peril as he learns more about the enigmatic Eva.

Set amidst the tensions that will spark a war across continents, Assegai delivers the fast-paced action and vivid history that has made Wilbur Smith an internationally bestselling author.

Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper

Stolen from her village, sold to the highest bidder,
fifteen-year-old Amari has only one thing left of her own — hope.

Amari's life was once perfect. Engaged to the handsomest man in her tribe, adored by her family, and living in a beautiful village, she could not have imagined everything could be taken away from her in an instant. But when slave traders invade her village and brutally murder her entire family, Amari finds herself dragged away to a slave ship headed to the Carolinas, where she is bought by a plantation owner and given to his son as a birthday present.

Survival seems all that Amari can hope for. But then an act of unimaginable cruelty provides her with an opportunity to escape, and with an indentured servant named Polly she flees to Fort Mose, Florida, in search of sanctuary at the Spanish colony. Can the illusive dream of freedom sustain Amari and Polly on their arduous journey, fraught with hardship and danger?

Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent

Meet Denver, a man raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana in the 1960s; a man who escaped, hopping a train to wander, homeless, for eighteen years on the streets of Dallas, Texas. No longer a slave, Denver's life was still hopeless-until God moved. First came a godly woman who prayed, listened, and obeyed. And then came her husband, Ron, an international arts dealer at home in a world of Armani-suited millionaires. And then they all came together.

But slavery takes many forms. Deborah discovers that she has cancer. In the face of possible death, she charges her husband to rescue Denver. Who will be saved, and who will be lost? What is the future for these unlikely three? What is God doing?

Same Kind of Different As Me is the emotional tale of their story: a telling of pain and laughter, doubt and tears, dug out between the bondages of this earth and the free possibility of heaven. No reader or listener will ever forget it.

Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.