at long last

I announce the winner!!! It's only four months late....woops!

Here you go:

1st place: Andrea Williams
2nd place: Buffy Garber
3rd place: Natalie Rizzieri

The prizes are: first place gets any book of their choice (at my expense); second place gets a $20 at amazon.com (or any bookstore of their choice); third place gets $10 at amazon.com (or any bookstore of their choice).

Claim your prizes!!!

I Can Haz Winner?

Tamie, man... being in Africa is no excuse. Winner. Me. Now.

Luvz n kizzes,

Phoenix

Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton

I read this book over months and months, reading one or two entries a day.  T'was lovely.  It's a journal she kept for one year, sometime in the 70s I think.  She was a solitary writer, living alone in a house on the east coast.  She reminded me a lot of myself, in ways in which I did not necessarily want to be reminded!!!  But I liked the book a lot, and often was inspired to write after I read something she wrote.  208 pages.

Here are the books that Natalie has read!!!

“Ararat” by Louise Gluck
“The Clerk’s Tale” by Spencer Reece
“Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson
“Traveling in the Family” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
“ABCs of Reading” by Ezra Pound
“Crush” by Richard Siken
“Women Who Run with the Wolves” by Clarissa P. Estes
“A Room of One’s Own” by Viriginia Woolf
“A companion for Owls” by Maurice Manning
“Poems of George Trakl” tr by James Wright and Robert Bly
“The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros
“American Women Poets in the 21st Century” ed Claudia Rankine
“A History of the Only War” by Christopher Davis
“The Skin I’m In” by Sharon Flake
“Spacecraft Voyager I” by Alice Oswald
“Fragment of a Head of a Queen” by Cate Marvin
“We Weep for our Strangeness” by Dennis Schmitz
“No Greater Love” by Mother Teresa
“Eros the Bittersweet” by Anne Carson
“Here All Dwell Free” by Gertrude Mueller Nelson
“Dreamsongs” by John Berryman
“Snow Country” by Yasunari Kawabata
“Walking Across Boundaries” by Russell M Linden
“Cuttlefish Bones” by Eugenio Montale
“Embryos and Idiots” by Larissa Szporluk
“The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane”
“About Night” by Dennis Schmitz
“Learning Human” by Les Murray
“Lament for a Son” by Nicholas Wolterstorff
“Beauty and Sadness” by Yasunari Kawabata
“Steppenwolf” by Hermen Hesse
“They Are Sleeping” by Joanna Klink
“The Book of Nightmares” by Galway Kinnell
“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Certain Women” by Madeleine L’Engle
“The Solace of Fierce Landscapes” by Belden Lane
“The Bean Trees” by Barbara Kingsolver
“Til We Have Faces” by CS Lewis
Books 2-4 of the “Chronicles of Narnia”
“Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry”
“Homeric Hymns” tr by Charles Boer
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” by Victor Hugo
“Collected Poems and Prose” by Mallarme
“The Triggering Town” by Richard Hugo
“Noonday Demon” by Andrew Solomon
“As I Lay Dying” by W. Faulkner
“Decreation” by Anne Carson
“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman
“Radical Wisdom” by Beverly Lanzetta
“The Poetics of Space” by G. Bachelard
“The Seeker” by Nelly Sachs
“Collected Poems” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James
“News of the Universe” ed Robert Bly
“Monkey” by Wu Ch’Eng-En
“The Tree Pillars of Zen”
“Native Guard” by Natasha Tretheway
“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg
“Collected Poems” by Rimbaud
“Worshipful Company of Fletchers” by James Tate
“Journal of a Solitude” by May Sarton
“My Alexandria” by Mark Doty
“Complete Poems” by Marianne Moore
“The Flexible Lyric” by Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Ahab’s Wife” by Sena Jeter Naslund
“Walk with Jesus” by Henri Nouwen
“Mists of Avalon” by Marion Bradley

total pages: 15,547

Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer

This book certainly goes on the "Best Books I've Read" list. It's hilarious, gorgeously written, unflinchingly true. It's about....the Holocaust, if you had to just say one thing it's about....but within that, it's about friendship, love, betrayal, forgiveness, evil, death....I highly recommend it! 276 pages.

Tamie

Waking, by Matthew Sanford

This is a memoir of a man who was in a car accident at age 13 and became paralyzed from the chest down. At the age of 25, he started practicing yoga, and eventually became a yoga teacher! It's not the best-written book on the planet, but it sure is an interesting story, and was especially fascinating to me since I want to teach yoga. 253 pgs.

Tamie

Whew -- Intense Stuff

Right Behind You by Gail Giles

Man, this was good. Young adult fiction about a teenager, who, when he was 9 yo, set another child on fire. He spends several years in a juvenile ward and then had to move to another state because of how angry the community was. Really really good stuff. How do you forgive yourself? How do you define a good/bad person? What is forgiveness/redemption? Yep. I liked it. 292 pages

Buffy

The End of the Year Approaches -- Where is everybody?

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir by Michael Greenberg
Very good memoir relating the author's (then) 15yo daughter suddenly starts showing bipolar behavior. Interesting to read a parent's perspective -- we so often try to figure out what we've done wrong. Also good to read the honest accounting of his relationship with his wife.
233 pages.

December by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
Fiction about an 11yo girl who stops speaking. Good. Very interesting to read immediately after Hurry Down Sunshine.
239 pages.

The Little Book by Selden Edwards
Such good stuff. Wheeler Burden. living in 1988 San Francisco, suddenly & unexplicably finds himself in Vienna in 1897. Enter Freud, Mahler, and all kinds of other goodness. I liked it, if you couldn't tell. So many many intersections of people and events.

405 pages

The Black Tower
What really happened to Louis-Charles, the son of Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI? Great first sentence: "I'm a man of a certain age -- old enough to have been every kind of fool -- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers." Lots of real historical characters in this one, too.

352 pages

The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez
short. author from argentina, translated from spanish. i liked it. "a chilling crime story in which the line between reality and deception has been erased" 215 pages.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Whew. So intense. First in a new young adult series. Sadly it was just published -- I'm ready for the next installment. from the book flap:

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown. But Prentisstown isn't like other towns. Everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts in an overwhelming, never-ending stream of Noise. There is no quiet, no privacy, no room for secrets. Or is there? Just a month away from the birthday that will make him a man, Todd and his dog, Manchee -- whose thoughts Todd can hear, too, whether he wants to or not-- stumble upon an area of complete silence. Which is impossible. Prentisstown has been hiding something form him, a secret so awful that Todd and Manchee are suddenly running for their lives. But how can you feel when your pursuers can hear your every thought? And where can you run when there's nowhere to go?

479 pages



Buffy

the holy longing

by Ronald Rolheiser

I wanted to really like this book, but I could only sort-of like it. The premise is that we all have a crazy and wild fire inside of us; what we do with that fire is our spirituality. The rest of the book is all about what we should do with the fire.

I love the premise! The rest of the book I found myself never fully trusting. There were parts that I underlined; there were parts I rolled my eyes at. I'm glad I read it, but I wish the author had done something different with his premise.

241 pages.

-Tamie

The Post-Birthday World & Child 44

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

Man, did I like it. I want to say it hit me like a freight train, but that's too instant -- it was more like medicine I took that I didn't know would make me dizzy.... lots to think about for me -- in some ways, really related to my own life. It reminded me of Sliding Doors -- though part of what struck me about the pbw -- the part where it was a conscious decision on the main character's part that affected the path the rest of her life took -- is not present in sliding doors --- more of a "fate/timing" kind of thing...........

517 pages

by Tom Rob Smith

A good one -- not cheery, but good.... First few pages set in 1930s Soviet Union, rest of the book takes place in 1950's S. Union. From the book flap:

Quote:

The mere suspicion of ideological disloyalty ... sends millions of innocents into the Gulags or to their executions. Defending the system from its citizens is the MGB, the State Security Force. And no MGB officer is more courageous, conscientious, or idealistic than Leo Demidov.

When Leo begins to believe that a murderer is on the loose -- an impossibility in Stalin's Soviet Union, where there is no crime -- he quickly becomes one of the suspected ones.

Knocked out my desire to trust ANYONE for a while, I think.
Another first novel.

446 pages

Buffy

the translator

I just finished The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur. I really "enjoyed" reading it, if you can enjoy reading a book about genocide. I would love to meet Daoud Hari, the author, whose heart is soft and wide open. Beautiful. For more of my thoughts on the book, go here.

-204 pages....from Tamie

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

A meteor hits the moon and knocks it closer in orbit, messing with the earth's climate majorly (do you like my technical terminology?). Good stuff. The entire book is 16 year old Miranda's journal entries. I liked it. Definitely made me want to stockpile way more non-perishable food than we currently have. You'll like the few veiled references to President Bush.

337 pages.

Buffy

the history of love

by Nicole Krauss

Ah, such a lovely book. She's married to Jonathan Safran Foer, and her writing style is definitely more similar to his than anyone else's I've read. The book is about........friendship, death, love, the Holocaust, books, deception......yeah, it's good. 255 pages.

Tamie

no, really, that's what it's about....

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

Whew -- long and intense. Been called a modern-day Hamlet -- set in Wisconsin -- with dogs. Yep. I was telling somebody about it the other day, speaking in Spanish, which is not my first language, and I'm pretty sure they thought I was just translating poorly. :)

566 pages.

Buffy

the sun shines

I read the September issue of The Sun Magazine. I really liked all the Reader's Write writings on porches. 48 pages.

-Tamie

New England Excitement

America America by Ethan Cain

Interesting story about politics in New York State in the early 70s and how it affected one man's life. A little hard for me to keep track of the three different time periods in which it took place. 458 pages.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Almost finished with this one, takes place in modern-day Salem, Mass. I liked it...... (one thing I take away from it is how interesting it would be to live there today..) from Amazon:

In Barry's captivating debut, Towner Whitney, a dazed young woman descended from a long line of mind readers and fortune tellers, has survived numerous traumas and returned to her hometown of Salem, Mass., to recover. Any tranquility in her life is short-lived when her beloved great-aunt Eva drowns under circumstances suggesting foul play. Towner's suspicions are taken with a grain of salt given her history of hallucinatory visions and self-harm. The mystery enmeshes local cop John Rafferty, who had left the pressures of big city police work for a quieter life in Salem and now finds himself falling for the enigmatic Towner as he mourns Eva and delves into the history of the eccentric Whitney clan. Barry excels at capturing the feel of smalltown life, and balances action with close looks at the characters' inner worlds. Her pacing and use of different perspectives show tremendous skill and will keep readers captivated all the way through. 390 pages.


Buffy

So I haven't posted in a while, but I promise I've been reading :)

I really wanted to share this book with you all out there. I checked it out of the library Saturday afternoon and as of Sunday night am 4/5ths of the way done. Though not finished, I feel confident recommending it to you all.

The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace by M. Scott Peck

What I love about it: 1) gender pronoun equality 2) community as a tangible, realistic goal 3) makes me feel normally about my obsessive desire for community 4) even though it was published in 1987, it is completely relevant to today (maybe that is sad that we have the same problems 20 years later...)

So, that's not a very good summary. Here's what the dustcover says...In his profound and powerful new book, he challenges us to take another journey in self-awareness: to achieve, through the creative experience of community, a new "connectedness" and wholeness which, in turn, can be shared by all the peoples and nations of the world.

Has anyone read it? I would love to discuss! If you haven't, go get it now. Give it to your friends.

Reading Rocks!
-Michelle "Who knew such amazing stuff has been sitting on library shelves for my entire lifetime" McMillan

the hours

Last night I finished The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. I highly recommend this book. It follows three story lines, each one day of the life in a woman, and the more you read the more you realize how interwoven they are. The first woman is Virginia Woolf--the day she started writing Mrs. Dalloway. The second woman is a woman named Laura who lives in the 50s. The second woman is Clarissa, whom her best friend calls Mrs. Dalloway--she lives in New York in the 90s. It's a beautifully written book, such amazing observations about being human. 226 pages.

-tamie

North Carolina and Sherlock Holmes and Oxygen

Back to Wando Passo by David Payne
I really liked this one -- in fact, several of us said we wish we'd had more discussion of it at book club (maybe we should have a second meeting to actually discuss the book) This was a re-read for me and I wasn't sure if it would strike me the same way the second time -- but it did.
It's such a complex storyline in some ways, I'm going to c & p from Amazon...

In this ambitious novel, Payne ( Gravesend Light, 2000) intertwines two troubled marriages--one contemporary and one from the 1860s--for a blend of history and suspense that deals with racism, slavery, miscegenation, incest, and voodoolike practices, as foreboding builds until the two stories intersect. At 45, former rock star Ransom "Ran" Hill, bipolar and off his meds, returns to his wife, Claire Delay, who took their children and left him five months earlier for her family home of Wando Passo, a former plantation south of Charleston. Although Ran desperately loves his wife of 19 years, Claire is making a new life with a new love, a story mirrored by the account of her ancestors that resurfaces when two skeletons are found on her property. Alternating chapters tell of Harlan Delay, who married Adie Huger to save himself from the sorrow and pain that ensued after his father brought home a black Cuban woman whom he loved but kept enslaved. Despite an occasional inconsistency or unanswered question, Payne handles this novel of love, loss, and betrayal deftly.

435 pages

The Moor by Laurie R. King
Another in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. This one returns to the scene of an actual Holmes story -- The Hound of the Baskervilles. I keep enjoying them. 297 pages.

Oxygen by Carol Cassella
This was good stuff -- I kept stopping to say to DH "This is a really good book". part of it, for me, was just the fact that it centers on a career I (and I think many people) know little about -- anesthesiology. Main character is an anesthesiologist in Seattle when something goes wrong in a surgery. That is the main plot, but her relationships with her sister and aging father are also involved. Yep, really really interesting stuff -- heartbreaking at times-- and I feel like I know a bit more about what it would be like to be an anesthesiologist. 288 pages.

Buffy in Denver

so many aurelianos

This afternoon I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What can I even say about this book? It is magical realism. It is extraordinary. I think it will become part of the mythology that I live with, understand life through. Every page has sentences that amaze. It is like reading Spanish poetry. Perhaps because it is Spanish poetry. I would love to read it again. But oh man, when 20 characters share the name Aureliano, and about 7 other characters share the name Jose Arcadio....well comrades, it does get confusing here and there. 383 pages.