Books
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Casual Classics Challenge
MizB over at MizB Challenges You is hosting 5 different challenges this year, one of which is the Casual Classics Challenge. I’ve been looking for some motivation and accountability to inspire me to read “Mrs. Dalloway”, in case I decide to read “The Hours”. Do you find my life pathetic when you read that sentence? I sorta do, but also, I suspect that those of you who read book blogs and participate in challenges probably understand. The rules of this challenge are quite casual, which is nice. The goal is to read 4 Classics in 2009. That’s it. And the definition of Classics* is pretty loose, too. Any book written…
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Revolutionary Road
“He felt as if he were sinking helplessly into the cushions and the papers and the bodies of his children like a man in quicksand. When the funnies were finished at last he struggled to his feet, quietly gasping, and stood for several minutes in the middle of the carpet, making tight fists in his pockets to restrain himself from doing what suddenly seemed the only thing in the world he really and truly wanted to do: picking up a chair and throwing it through the picture window. What in the hell kind of life was this? What in God’s name was the point or the meaning or the purpose…
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Dewey’s Book Challenge
I was looking around for a Classics Reading Challenge yesterday, hoping for some accountability that will get me to read a few classics, when I came across this excellent blog, A Novel Challenge, which lists a TON of current reading challenges. Really. A lot. If you’re looking for a chick lit challenge? She has links to one. Historical Fiction more your thing? She’s got that, too. Practically anything you’re looking for, it’s there. I found a classics challenge there, and as soon as I figure out what I’m going to read for it, I’ll put up a list. Anyway, one of the challenges I came across is the Dewey’s Books…
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2009 TBR Book Challenge
Having just finished the TBR Challenge for 2008, I’m ready to set my sights toward 2009. In honor of one of my favorite book bloggers, Dewey, who passed away recently, several of the books on this list are books I came to via her blog, The Hidden Side of a Leaf. So many of the books I’ve read in the last couple of years, I found on her blog. I am going to miss her. The challenge is to read 12 books in 12 months, all at once or spread out, whichever way you want. They cannot be re-reads, and you have to make a list and stick to it,…
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The Pillars of the Earth
(picture and game found here) The Pillars of the Earth is set in 12th century England, and sweeps a period of about 40 years. It is the story of the building of a grand Cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge (there is a real Kingsbridge, but not this one), and the people involved. That doesn’t sound like it would make for a very interesting novel, but it turned out to be a page-turner of a book with flawed characters and enough twists and turns to keep any soap opera buff happy. There is sex, violence, murder, sabotage, intrigue, historical fact, and lots of ups and downs. The main characters…
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Life As We Knew It/The Dead and The Gone
Life As We Knew It and The Dead and The Gone are companion young adult/science fiction novels covering the same events from the points of view of two different characters. In both stories, the moon is struck by a very large meteor, pushing the moon off its axis and closer to Earth, resulting in tsunamis, violent storms, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. These natural disasters result in power shortages, food shortages, crop failures, widespread death and disease, and the failure of communication systems worldwide. Life As We Knew It centers on 16-year-old Miranda and her family, who live in rural Pennsylvania. It is written in the form of Miranda’s diary,…
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Charming Billy
Billy Lynch, alcoholic, romantic, kind and loving man, has died. His friends and family come together to comfort his widow, and to celebrate his life. And Billy’s life seems to have two stories to it. The sad story of his alcoholism, which his friends and family tried again and again to guide him away from, with no success. And the sad story of his first love, an Irish girl whom he intended to marry, but who goes back to Ireland and dies. At least, that’s what Billy is told. The truth is, she took the money he sent her for her passage to America, bought a gas station…
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Run
Run begins with the story of Bernadette’s statue, an heirloom especially treasured by the women in her family. The statue is of Mary, Mother of God, and looks remarkably like the women in the family. The daughter who looks the most like the statue inherits it, and the others bitterly wish it were theirs. Now that she has died, with three sons and no daughters, her sisters show up, demanding that her husband give it to them. We hear the history of the statue, which is sweet and sad and full of lies. Bernadette and her husband Bernard had three sons. They both wanted large families, and though they had…
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No Country For Old Men
What you might think of as a blessing is often a curse, and if you’re going to pick that curse up and put it in your pocket, do so fully, and don’t look back. These are words that might have been helpful to Llewelyn Moss before he went out hunting antelope one hot afternoon. While following the antelope herd on foot, he comes across the horrific remains of a drug deal gone wrong. Several trucks out in the middle of the Texas desert, shot full of holes, blood and bodies all around, and a big block of heroin in the back. There is one man still alive, barely, and it…
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The Gathering
Two years ago, I had a letter from Earnest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains….’I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms. And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all. And I wondered…
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The Bluest Eye
Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that marigolds did not grow. A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody’s did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and…
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Booking Through Thursday
Deb has several blogs, one of which is a weekly book meme. I thought I’d join in this week, though not on Thursday, as I didn’t get to it in time. So for me, it’s Booking Through Friday. What was the last book you bought? Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief, by Martha Whitmore Hickman. It was recommended by a friend of mine, who said that it helped her get through the loss of her mother a few years ago. Name a book you have read MORE than once The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. One of my all time favorites. I’ve also re-read the…
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October is Children’s Magazine Month
Maya receives quite a few magazines. To the question posed to Sarah Palin about what she read, Maya said she would have answered, “I read Cricket, Stone Soup, Discover, Nick Magazine, and National Geographic Kids. Whew. That’s a lot of magazines. We’re pretty willing to spoil her when it comes to reading. It’s hard to say no when she wants a book or a magazine, because we want her to love to read, though of course we have been known to take her to the library quite often, and when she thought she had lost her wallet a few months ago, she was most concerned about the loss of her…
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Possession: A Romance
Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document. What had Christabel thought, when she read it? Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860? There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home. He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters – those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual. LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel’s apparent absence at the time of Blanche’s death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women. This quarrel now looked quite…
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Buy A Friend A Book Week
Buy a Friend A Book Week takes place the first weeks of October, January, April, and July. The idea is that you buy a friend a book for no reason, except that you like them and would like them to have it. Hey, that’s now! OK, I’m in. Sort of. You remember how we pared down our books last year, after moving our things back into our house, right? You also remember that I’m trying to be financially responsible, right? So, instead of buying a friend a book, I’ve decided to GIVE a friend a book. Guess what? This means you! If you’re interested in any of the following books…