This year, I participated in the Book Blogger Holiday Gift Swap, which is basically Secret Santa for book bloggers. My gift arrived yesterday - a nice post-Christmas treat!! Thanks so much to Lexie from Poisoned Rationality for this lovely collection:
Ha Jin's short story collection The Bridegroom
Kate Emerson's Secrets of the Tudor Court: Between Two Queens
And a very cute snowman snow globe, which my daughters promptly took off with.
Here is a photo:
Thank you, Lexie! Great picks!
Congratulations to the winners of the Bleeding Heart Square and A Reliable Wife giveaways!
Random.org picked...
Bleeding Heart Square: Renee G.
A Reliable Wife: A Bookshelf Monstrosity
Enjoy!!
Hello EDIWTB readers and book lovers everywhere - happy new year! I hope that 2010 brings you many hours of reading and the joy of discovering new books and authors. My main new year's resolution is a simple one: to read more. I need to spend fewer hours on the computer and more hours actually reading. I know, hard to do as a book blogger! But that's my biggest frustration - not getting through enough books. I fear that the publicists I know are going to put me on a no-review list and cut me off, because the books they send me must appear to go into a black hole. But I promise that I have the best of intentions and really do hope to get to them in the near future. They are in a safe place.
I thought I'd share my favorite two books from 2009. One wasn't published in 2009, but I read it in 2009 - The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. For me, the hype was merited. That book has stayed with me since I read it last summer. Here is my review of it, as well as a comparison of the movie and the book. My second favorite is a recent read - Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein. Just my type of book - a meaty family drama that's well-written and wryly observed - and reviewed here.
Here's to another year of great reading!!
Are you in the mood for a dark thriller-type book? If so, I am giving away two of them.
The first is Bleeding Heart Square, by Andrew Taylor. From Amazon:
British author Taylor springs a number of well-timed and well-planned surprises in this briskly paced thriller set in November 1934. Fed up with the slights and slaps of her husband, well-to-do Lydia Langstone decides to room temporarily with her father, whom she hasn't seen since she was a toddler, in his seedy boarding house in London's Bleeding Heart Square. Lydia soon finds out that papa is in the pocket of landlord Joseph Serridge, a darkly charismatic man skilled at manipulating others. Serridge is being investigated by another tenant, journalist Rory Wentwood, for his involvement in the disappearance of Philippa Penhow, the house's former owner. As Lydia helps Rory in his delvings, she uncovers a tangled skein of scandal and deadly intrigues stretching back decades and involving many of those near and dear to her. A hasty finale is the only misstep in this otherwise satisfying period piece.
I received this book in the mail from HarperCollins (Hi FTC!), but my TBR list is so long that I'd like to pass it along to someone else.
The second book is A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick. I read this book earlier this year and reviewed it here. It too is dark and suspenseful. From Amazon:
Set in 1907 Wisconsin, Goolrick's fiction debut gets off to a slow, stylized start, but eventually generates some real suspense. When Catherine Land, who's survived a traumatic early life by using her wits and sexuality as weapons, happens on a newspaper ad from a well-to-do businessman in need of a "reliable wife," she invents a plan to benefit from his riches and his need. Her new husband, Ralph Truitt, discovers she's deceived him the moment she arrives in his remote hometown. Driven by a complex mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, he marries her anyway. After the wedding, Catherine helps Ralph search for his estranged son and, despite growing misgivings, begins to poison him with small doses of arsenic. Ralph sickens but doesn't die, and their story unfolds in ways neither they nor the reader expect. This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close.
Algonquin sent me (Hi FTC!) the paperback version of A Reliable Wife, but I've read it, so I'd like to pass it along too.
If you'd like to win these two books, leave me a comment below, and be sure to leave your email address so I know how to reach you. I will pick a name on Sunday January 3.
Good luck!
I picked up After You on a bit of a whim the other day - it seemed like a relatively light read, which I was in the mood for. In that respect, it didn't disappoint. It's the story of Ellie, a thirty-five year old woman from Boston, whose best friend Lucy is murdered in a tony London neighborhood in front of her 8 year-old daughter Sophie. Ellie, who is at a crossroads in her relationship with her husband, flies to London - for several months - to help take care of Sophie and process her friend's death. While there, she is forced to confront the problems in her marriage and learns about some problems in Lucy's marriage that she didn't know about.
I had heard of Julie Buxbaum before I bought After You. She is a fellow Harvard Law School alum who, like me, appears to have left the law for greener pastures. Her first book, The Opposite of Love, got good press, and I was curious to read one of her books. While I enjoyed After You and found it readable and compelling, I also thought it was kind of predictable. I don't want to give away too much, but there were some plot twists that seemed cliched to me, like I have read them before. Ellie was also frustrating to the point of irritation at times. I don't have to like all the characters I read about, but if I can't understand why they are acting as they are - if even they don't even seem to understand what they are doing - then I get turned off. There were also some plot points that got short shrift here. They had the potential to make the book more interesting - Lucy's double life, for example - but were left relatively unexplored.
I liked the London setting and Buxbaum's clear, fluid prose. i just wish she had taken some more risks with this book and gone in some directions that didn't feel like well-traveled paths.
I just did a search for other reviews of this book, and am finding that I am in the minority here. Several bloggers whom I respect a great deal - such as Heather from Book Addiction and Swapna of S. Krishna's Books, enjoyed After You a lot and had very positive things to say about it. So you might want to check out their reviews to get a balanced view of this book.
Relax, FTC, I bought this one myself at the Strand.
USA Today came out today with a list of the most literate cities in the U.S. This year, Washington DC knocked out Minneapolis for the #2 slot (usually Seattle and Minneapolis take the top two slots). Yay, Washington, DC! The factors that go into determining the top 10 are: "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources". Click through to the article to see if your city is on the list.
I am not surprised to see DC high up on the list. There are lots of great book bloggers in the area too - Swapna of S. Krishna's books, Jenn of Jenn's Bookshelves, Michelle of Galley Smith, Serena of Savvy Verse and Wit, and many more that I am sure I am leaving off. (If you're a DC book blogger, leave me a comment!)
We are full for the EDIWTB book club for Between Here and April, which I announced yesterday. My gmail account did something odd this morning (deleted a whole bunch of email), so if you emailed me sometime between Tuesday night (late) and this morning around 9, could you resend me your email with your address to gweiswasser@gmail.com? Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience!
I am happy to announce the January EDIWTB book club selection: Between Here and April, by Deborah Copaken Kogan. I received a review copy of this book from Algonquin a few months ago, and thought it would make a good book club selection. Here's a blurb from Amazon:
How could a mother kill her children? This breathtaking first novel from photojournalist Kogan attempts a heart-wrenching answer. Elizabeth Lizzie Burns Steiger, a 41-year-old TV producer/journalist, has a hallucination while watching a performance of Medea at a Manhattan theater; she sees her best friend in first grade, April Cassidy, who was killed by April's depressed mother, Adele, in 1972 in Potomac, Md., along with April's sister. In addition to exploring her memories in therapy, Lizzie interviews the Cassidys' former neighbor and others who knew the family for a proposed cable network documentary, but a priceless Pandora's box—tapes of Adele with her psychiatrist—provides the most startling revelations. Kogan skillfully interweaves Lizzie's struggles with her troubled marriage, parenting and a personal trauma shared in the Balkans with a former lover in this unflinching portrait of filicide, which still manages to find light in the darkness of a very disturbing subject.
The Washington Post says Between Here and April may be "the perfect book club book".
Caribou's Mom says:
Kogan’s writing is sharp, intuitive and hypnotic. I always enjoy novels written by journalists who have honed their writing skills to get to the core of the story quickly, and who know how to create tension and conflict between characters. This is not a book for everyone. Many readers will be disturbed by the images Kogan creates. The subject matter will turn many readers off. But, those readers willing to follow Kogan into the darkness will be rewarded with a story not soon forgotten.
Book a Week with Jen says: "It's a well written, moving read (though not perfect -- the end is odd). And it's one of those books that had me thinking about it long after I'd put the book back on the shelf."
If you can handle the dark topic, please join me here for the book club discussion for Between Here and April. Algonquin has generously agreed to send 15 copies of the book to EDIWTB readers who sign up. Once the books go out, I will pick a day (probably late January or early February so that people have enough time to read it), and will post a review of the book. Book club participants (and anyone who else who has read the book) are encouraged to post their thoughts in the comments to keep the discussion going. We may also get Deborah Copaken Kogan to answer questions in a later post.
If you're interested in participating, please send an email to me at gweiswasser@gmail.com with your contact info in the following format:
Name
Mailing Address
Email address
The first 15 people who email me will receive copies of the book.
Thank you to Algonquin!!
A lot of sites/papers have come out with their lists of the top books of the year. Here are a few of the ones I have seen:
Whew. That was a lot of links!
So, EDIWTB readers, what are your picks for the best books of 2009? Please share them here.
In addition to loving to read, I am also a big TV fan. I used to watch more than I do now, but I still manage to follow several shows a week, thanks to my DVR. And I just started a new job at Discovery Communications, home to the Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, etc., so I am even more immersed in TV.
Just like in books, I always notice good writing on TV. I find it pretty rare, so when the writing is good, it stands out to me. I was therefore very happy to see that several of the shows I love were nominated for Writers Guild Awards this year: Mad Men, Glee, 30 Rock, Modern Family, The Good Wife, and The Office. Like Jennifer Amstrong of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "I’m a writing-first kind of TV watcher, so it makes sense that I’d like this list."
Did any of your favorite shows make the list? Any missing?
The English Major, by Jim Harrison, which came out last year, is out in paperback, according to the NYT Book Review's Paperback Row:
“We English majors of a serious bent are susceptible to high ideals we paste on our lives like decals,” the protagonist of Harrison’s 15th work of fiction, an English teacher turned cherry farmer, says. Dumped by his wife of 38 years, he leaves his Michigan home and heads west; the novel is his “trip journal.” Along the way he contemplates sex, marriage, farming, fatherhood, teaching, the landscape, American history and the younger brother who drowned when they were boys.
I have been curious about this book for a while. I have to say, though, that the review I read on Shelf Love tonight made me less interested. Sounds like the book is written "in a free-flowing stream-of-consciousness style, filled with run-on sentences and
odd non sequiturs", which is not a style I usually enjoy. It was fine for Faulkner in my English Lit survey class in college, but when I have 15 minutes a day to read before bedtime, I don't have the patience for it.
RabbitReader said that while The English Major "is not riotously funny, it does have its moments with some sassy, snappy prose.... A pretty decent road novel worth a couple of lazy afternoons."
Cogito Ergo Sum (another local book blogger - he bought the book at Politics and Prose!) had very good things to say about The English Major: "This book was a pleasant surprise. There was something fresh and striking on virtually every page -- at times wry or outright funny, or poignant, or, sometimes, wise....It's a quick, wonderful read, a homespun picaresque that is often touching."
Has anyone in EDIWTB-land read this yet? Please weigh in...