Mariam had never before worn a burqa. Rasheed had to help her put it on. The padded headpiece felt tight and heavy on her skull, and it was strange seeing the world through a mesh screen. She practiced walking around her room in it and kept stepping on the hem and stumbling. The loss of peripheral vision was unnerving, and she did not like the suffocating way the pleated cloth kept pressing against her mouth.“You’ll get used to it,” Rasheed said. “With time, I bet you’ll even like it.” They took a bus to a place Rasheed called the Shar-e-Nau Park, where children pushed each other on swings and slapped…

Richard Mayhew is on his way to dinner with his fiancee’ Jessica, an important dinner where he will be meeting her boss for the first time.  When a young girl steps through a door in a wall and collapses in front of them, bleeding, Jessica is all for ignoring her and moving on to impress her boss, but Richard vows to help the girl.  She begs to not be taken to the hospital, to be taken somewhere safe from her attackers, so he takes her home with him, infuriating Jessica in the process. In getting help for the girl, Door, Richard finds himself in a labyrinthine version of London below…

Immediately following her diagnoses of a fatal brain tumor, Margaret Hughes stops in at a small pastry shop in Seattle, and orders four desserts.  Sort of a ‘what the hell’ approach, because really, if you only have a year to live, who cares what you eat?  She strikes up a conversation with the shop girl, a painfully thin girl with black lipstick and a nose-ring.  Margaret asks, “If you found out you had only a short while to live, maybe a year or two, how would you spend your time?”   The answer surprises her. “I suppose I’d think about whatever it is that scares me the most – relationshipwise, I…

I could see the details of the world they passed through.  Now that I had the gifts of the Buddha, I could flow unimpeded by safety concerns, and the hidden forms of life revealed themselves: a harmless snake with iridescent stripes, myriad fungi, flowering parasites of colors and shapes that suggested sexual turgidity – a wealth of waxy flora and moist fauna endemic to this hidden spot of the earth, as yet undiscovered by humans, or at least those who assigned taxonomic labels.  I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are part of it.  We fail to see ninety-nine percent of the glories of nature,…

Fortunate Son is Walter Mosley’s parable of color and class in America, exemplified by two boys, one black, one white, who live together for a few years as children, and consider themselves to be brothers. Tommy is the black brother, who was born with a hole in his lung, which curses his health and strength his entire life.  He spends his first 6 months of life in the hospital, visited every day by his devoted single mother, who comes to see him as soon as she gets off of work. Eric is the same age as Tommy, and is born in the same hospital. He is described over and over…

Langston Braverman walked out on her PhD oral exams, and came home to small town Indiana to recover from that which ails her. She is so wrapped up in her own pain that she has no energy left to pay attention to what is going on around her, and there’s a lot going on. Her childhood friend Alice has died, leaving two young children behind, and Langston is so self-absorbed that she isn’t even the least bit interested in how her friend died, doesn’t want to attend the funeral, just wants to hide in her parents’ attic and try to figure out what to do with her life. While Langston’s…

In the meantime, I am spending my days getting this place in order.  There is quite a lot that needs doing.  I did not pay much for it.  In fact, I had been prepared to shell out a lot more to lay my hands on the house and the grounds, but there was not much competition.  I do understand why now, but it doesn’t matter.  I am pleased anyway.  I try to do most of the work myself, even though I could have paid a carpenter, I am far from skint, but then it would have gone too fast.  I want to use the time it takes.  Time is important…

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,…

(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…