Bookmarked: Cape Cod Book Reviews

Notes for teens and other “young” readers

Melanie Lauwers — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:15:10 +0000

Teen poetry contest

To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Cultural Center of Cape Cod will host its third annual Teen Poetry Grand Slam at 6:30 p.m. April 8.
Teens who are not in school are welcome.
Poets should have two poems ready to go, since there are two rounds.
Pre-registration is required. Send your name, age, address, school and phone number of Lauren Wolk at lworkculturalccc@verizon.net.
There are a few rules:

No foul language or abusive language, and no props, music or costumes.
Poems must be performed within a 3-minute time frame.
Poems should be performed, not just read, but poems can be brought on paper.
The decision of the judges is final.

Prizes include: $100 for All-Cape Teen Slam Champion; $75 for second prize; and $50 for third prize.

To learn more, visit www.cultural-center.org or call 508-349-7100.

Not a teen, but you want to win a contest?

Enter the Cheerios New Author Contest with a children’s book of your own writing.

Contest is open for entries until July 15 and are accepted online at www.spoonfulsofstoriescontest.com. Entries will be accepted in English or Spanish.

Winners receive a cash prize and a book deal from Simon & Schuster, plus their book will be distributed in paperback form inside Cheerios boxes and later distributed in hardcover.

YA novel truly satisfying

Well, I’ve read my first YA novel and what a great story. YA success story David Patneaude’s newest novel – due out this month – is “Epitaph Road,” the story of a group of teens who uncover, then seek to thwart the continuation of a horrible plot to decimate one entire gender of the population. Trust me, you’ve never read a plot like this before; the “epitaph” in “Epitaph Road” is literal.
Let’s just say that I’m a mature – make that very mature – reader, but I thoroughly enjoyed this smart story about kids who think on their feet but never lose their hearts.

Meet this author at www.patneaude.com.

Home remedy

Melanie Lauwers — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:02:00 +0000

I don’t often get sick, but the one or two times a year when I do, it tends to hit me hard. Maybe it’s because I don’t get a lot of practice with colds, flu, sinus infections and the like, I feel sheepish about staying home when one of these strike.
That was the case Wednesday when the cold that my stepdaughter had been carrying around with her for three weeks finally landed in my sinuses. I felt like my head had become a balloon (just like the commercial!) and all I wanted to do was put my head down somewhere.
I left work early but still felt lousy Thursday and so I called in sick.
Off and on, throughout the day, I drifted into brief naps, depending on whether I had just taken or was overdue to take cold medicine. And when I wasn’t asleep, I was reading.
I rarely get to read in the daytime; I’m a bedtime reader myself. Although I always SAY I want to read in the daytime, in fact, daylight usually draws me to do housework or make some other effort that takes me away from my book.
Yesterday was different; there was no other activity I had the energy to do. The couch was my world and reading was my best entertainment. Have you seen daytime television lately? What a waste of time ….
Anyway, I started the day with 100 pages left to read of an upcoming novel, which frankly seemed a little draggy.
But picking up and putting down the book all day, I came very close to having it finished by bedtime, and in fact, my naps made it possible for me to stay up long enough to finish the book at night.
Wow, so that’s what it might be like to not work for a living and to spend part of the daylight hours reading.
Hmm.
Anyway, the cold is better today and I’m back in the cubicle – you can’t keep a good book editor down, I always say.
And the book is finished.
So, how bad was that sick day? Not bad at all.

It’s the neighborly thing to do

Melanie Lauwers — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:11:42 +0000

I spent a good chunk of Friday and will spend a good chunk of Monday writing about new books by Cape and Island authors.
That must mean another Cape Cod Book Scene column is on the way.
That it is and it’ll find its way into the paper on March 7.
I swear, I always mean to gather all the new books together when I get a small pile, but every single time, a fresh influx arrive just as I begin writing.
It’s fun to crack open these new books for the first time. The authors have invested time and pieces of themselves into the writing and production and I have the utmost respect for every single one of them.
So next Sunday, there’ll be 16 new books to read about – books of fiction, poetry and fine arts
I’ve got to get back to writing about those books, now, but you can mark your calendar to catch up with the newest work by a broad spectrum of local authors on March 7.
Our neighbors.

It’s not over … until you read the whole thing

Melanie Lauwers — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:24:17 +0000

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was just 100 pages into Daniel Okrent’s upcoming “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.”
It’s been a very interesting, entertaining and informative book, and I’m now just 50 or 60 pages from the end of the story.
But that’s not the end of the book and I don’t intend to put the book down until I’m totally finished with it.
A trick I learned in college was to begin a new book – textbook or literary tome – by reading all the parts that come extra with the text: the cover (inside and out), the front page, the copyright page, foreword, sources, appendices …
Then read the book.
There’s a lot to learn from these pieces. I’ve found nuggets on the copyright or resource pages, including ideas for further reading; author and cover art data tucked on the inside of the cover; the go-to names of other experts on the acknowledgments page; and an entry point into difficult books in the foreword or preface.
For example, the entire time I was reading Wally Lamb’s “The Hour I First Believed: A Novel,” about the aftermath of the Columbine killings for one couple, I kept asking myself “Why has he written this book?” It was very long, serpentine in places and I read it with a perpetually perplexed mind set.
Well, lo and behold, Lamb gave me the answer in a thoughtful and thought-provoking epilogue that answered my many of my questions. I still may have had problems with the book, but at least I better understood its purpose.
So, even when I’m done with the text of Okrent’s new nonfiction, I won’t be done until I finish those additional “chapters.”
I figure if the author went to so much trouble to produce them and include them, the least I can do is uncover the nuggets they may contain.

No slowdown this winter in Cape’s literary scene

Melanie Lauwers — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:34:55 +0000

Ah, Cape Cod in winter. when half the population heads south and the other half hunkers down in front of a roaring fire reading old mysteries.

Not.

For a recession winter, this sure has been a busy one. And on the Books desk, you’d never know this was the “quiet season.”
In past winters, January, February and even March were marked by few new books being published by local authors and few if any local author appearances.
After all, they were all home writing books that would be published during high season, aka summer.
In fact, there have been winters when the “Author Events” column that appears in Sunday’s Books section appeared with little more than a headline and the bottom blurb on how and where to send your event.
Not this year.
Except for maybe one week – the one right after Christmas – author events have been going nonstop throughout January and February.
Part of the reason is that both months have their fair share of holidays: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Presidents Day, Valentine’s Day …
And each one of those holidays or celebrations has a literary component to it.
Last Monday, for example, I sat down with Jill Erickson, reference librarian at the Falmouth Public Library and Mindy Todd, host of “The Point,” and we talked for 30 minutes about new and relatively new books about black history. Jill and I didn’t bring a single book in common. I brought only brand new books and found dozens to choose from at a local bookstore.
Local authors aren’t empty-handed either.
On the side of my desk sits a stack of 10 new books (several more are on the way) that will appear in the next Cape Cod Book Scene column on March 7.

Why now? Because the books are out there, published and ready to be purchased and read right now.

Don’t worry: More books will come onto shelves come May, June, July and August. And September, October, November, December.

Black History Month celebrated with new stories

Melanie Lauwers — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:29:58 +0000

I always like to make a lot of Black History Month, because I believe you can never know enough about your country and its people.
The pages of the Cape Cod Times Books section are a good place to keep the writing of black authors and about black culture current and underscored.
Another good place is with host Mindy Todd on “The Point,” an NPR radio talk show. Falmouth Public Library reference specialist Jill Erickson and I will join Mindy Monday morning (Feb. for a lively discussion of great books having to do with Black History Month. You can tune in at 9:30 on WCAI 90.1, WNAN 91.1 or WZAI 94.3.
In advance of the show, I went shopping for new titles about black history and found many great new books for adults and children.
Among them, a new book I had read about that uncovers slavery in New England and the northern tier of states?
New England?
I thought I knew a lot about my adopted region and although I had read bits and pieces here and there about how the slave trade was part of the money that built the area’s early economy, I had never read that slaves were kept in the region. But now I know they were.
The new book is called “Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North,” by C.S. Manegold; it’s just one of likely two dozen or more we’ll be talking about Monday.
Join us and join in.

Oops, a correction: Several weeks ago I wrote a blog about the 2010 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton (“Writing for Laughs: You Can Do It!) and I erroneously about the guest speakers. Seems I thought – not sure why – that late-night funnyman David Letterman was going to speak. Not so, the planners tell me. One of his writers will speak, but not Letterman himself.

Raise a toast to this new book about Prohibition

Melanie Lauwers — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:34:46 +0000

What do you think of when you think of Prohibition?
Stern-faced women in black crinoline?
Stern-faced preachers slamming down the Good Book?
Gangsters moidering anybody who gets in the way of their bootlegging business?
Speakeasies in 1930s movies with those cool doors with the little windows in them?
Then here’s another question: What do you actually know about Prohibition?
Like me, you probably know that the prohibition of alcohol in the United States by alteration of the Constitution lasted for just a handful of years and resulted in what seemed to many to be a decade of full-tilt crime.
After all, anyone who imbibed was technically a criminal.
That made for an awful lot of people, since the change in the law didn’t alter people’s desire for alcohol, just its accessibility.
All this leads up to a new book due out in May that arrived in the cubicle as an advance release about two weeks ago.
Called “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,” it got my attention immediately, because even though I grew up with movies about Prohibition and grandparents who talked about it, and I studied what I thought was just about every period in American history, I didn’t know the details about the first and only time the United States outlawed a common item.
I took the book home, did a little background research, and cracked it open the other night and …
It is hilarious.
Author Daniel Okrent, who splits his time between Manhattan and Cape Cod, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for history for “Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center.” He may very well be a finalist again and if he buys us a round, we should make sure he’s the winner.
There is nothing ponderous or self-righteous about his text. While presenting copious facts in what the publisher calls a “narrative history,” Okrent finds numerous ways to underscore just how ridiculous and to what lengths people would go to outlaw alcohol.
Don’t get me wrong. Alcohol has destroyed many a life and in the well-awash 19th century, women and children, second-class citizens considered little more than chattel to the men, suffered greatly from the toll alcohol took.
But some of the temperance campaigns and public relations stunts one must grudgingly admire for their silliness.

I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like with the book – just 100 pages or so – but so far I have been delighted with what I’ve learned and how I’ve learned it.
Will share more at a later date, but if you like your history full of characters and maybe with a twist of lemon, keep this book in mind.

Who knew Prohibition could be so fun?

Melanie Lauwers — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:11:19 +0000

On “The Point”: Everybody’s got a memoir in them

Melanie Lauwers — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:45:11 +0000

If you watch Oprah Winfrey or just stroll through bookstore shelves, you likely know that memoir is hot, hot, hot.
Forget the old days when people had to grow old before they “qualified” to write a memoir. Nowadays, writers pen memoirs when they’re young …. haven’t done a lot … and haven’t paid any dues in other genres.
And then, many write a memoir, part two, a mere year or two later.
That contemporary timetable and the avalanche of memoirs published in the last 5 to 10 years begs the question: Are these true autobiographies? Are they lives retold on the page? Or are they a genre we might dub “personal nonfiction.”
After all, the new generation of memoirs do not necessarily begin at the begin of a life; and most aren’t any where close to the end of that life, which may be decades away.
In fact, most memoirs select just those aspects of a life that seem interesting enough to sell books (or get an interview with an interviewer) and many autobiographies touch on the details of early life only to focus heavily on the part of the life that brought the person to our attention in the first place.
In preparing for an appearance (with Jill Erickson, Falmouth Public Library reference librarian) on Mindy Todd’s NPR program “The Point” tomorrow morning at 9:30 (WCAI, 90.1), all I had to do was turn around in the cubicle and pull six memoirs off the shelves. I could not have pulled six of any other genre, and in fact, in the two-plus years we’ve done this show, I’ve always had to go hunting other places for material. Not this time.
Sixties’ girl that I am, I’d like to suggest that we stop calling the ‘60s the “me decade.” I think the past decade of memoirs deserves that honor.
And the next decade: I bet it’s even more self-focused. There’s money is those memoirs.

Writing for laughs – you can do it!

Melanie Lauwers — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:21:45 +0000

I thought 2009 was the year of “We could sure use a laugh,” but I think 2010 is trying hard to be the No. 1 year of bad news.
That said, laughter is the best medicine, so they say, and laugh we will, even if only at ourselves.
But if you have a talent for wordsmith and a hankering to make others laugh, there’s a workshop and a contest for you.
The 2010 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton, Ohio, will run April 15 through 17. Attendees come from all over the U.S. and Canada to learn how to write and publish funny material, both for adults and for kids, and in various forms.
This year’s speakers include late-night funnyman David Letterman; New York Times columnist Gail Collins; humorist Loretta LaRoche (“Lighten Up”); longtime Letterman writer Bill Scheft; W. Bruce Cameron, author of “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter”; and others.
The fee is $375 and as of today (Fri., Jan. 15), there were 50 slots remaining.
Find more information at www.humorwriters.org.

OK, so you can’t or don’t want to go to Dayton. But you think you’re pretty funny.
Enter the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition. The competition closes on Jan. 31; if you’re funny and a fast writer, you can make it.
Find complete details at www.wclibrary.info.
Here’s another juicy tidbit. The entries are judged by folks from across the country, among them, according to Cape Cod Times columnist Saralee Perel, locals Marilee Crocker, a Times business columnist; former Times music columnist Bill O’Neill; and Times features editor Anne Humphrey.

My all-time favorite Erma Bombeck quote: “I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.”
My sentiments exactly!