Missed the #BEATwittyparty?

Me, too, and we had all the crazies at work so no one was terribly sympathetic about not having fun. And when I logged into Twitter everyone was done - no drunk-tweeting! I don't know whether I should be impressed or disappointed....hahaha!

Be sure to visit Fizzy Thoughts to see the songs she wrote for the Twitty Party - they are hysterical!

Natasha is lovely and hosting a Twitty Party - even though she's in New York at BEA - giveaway at her blog (including a mystery surprise from BEA) so see her post for instructions.

If you were trying to follow the #BEATwittyparty chat I guess it was moving really fast so be sure to check Rebecca's blog to see all the winners.

Don't forget - "No BEA? Books anyway!" is still on.

Sarah Prineas: May 30, 2009 @ 2pm

Heads up!

The lovely Sarah Prineas, author of The Magic Thief and The Magic Thief: Lost, will be reading and signing her books at the Barnes and Noble in the Coral Ridge Mall at 2pm tomorrow (May 30). She's helping to kick of B&N's Summer Reading Program. Yay!!!!!

So come meet Sarah and stay for the Kick-Off Party at 4pm!

If you're not going to BEA...

Many of us in the book-reading, Twittering blogosphere are stuck at home instead of attending Book Expo America in New York.

BEA attendees have been Twittering about the seminars, panels, booths, signings - jealous!

Those of us non-attendees are having a BEA Twitter Party tonight from 8-10pm Eastern hosted by Rebecca at The Book Lady's Blog. This post lists all the BEA Twitty Party participants and this post shows all the goodies up for grabs between the party participants (please follow Rebecca's instructions and thanks to all the generous giveaway donors). Follow the party on Twitter using the #BEAtwittyparty hashtag and make sure you have fun because I will be stuck closing at the bookstore only to log into Twitter at 1130pm Eastern and find everyone drunk-tweeting (stinks, but someone has to sell the books). Rebecca also has links to other giveaways and stuck-at-home-for-BEA fun including the BEA Pout-a-thon 09 hosted by the amazing Laurie Halse Anderson.

For those of us who might need a little retail therapy to get over being BEA-less, Jen at Devourer of Books is hosting "No BEA? Books anyway!" all weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). See her page for more details but in short: 1) go buy books (anywhere you like, as long as you buy them), 2) blog about your book purchases, and 3) link up your blog/purchase details by using Mr. Linky in Jen's page. As mentioned above, I'll be working at the bookstore Friday, and Saturday and Sunday, too, so I'll expect to see you out and about to support publishing, authors, reading, book, etc!

The Whole Five Feet

I borrowed The Whole Five Feet by Christopher Beha - I was interested in Beha's take on the shelf because my father has been trying to acquire a set of Harvard Classics (aka "The Five Foot Shelf of Books" among other names) to read; I find the "to read" part a little odd because my father is a systems engineer (my mother is more the reader of my two parents). At a crossroads in his late twenties, Beha decided to read one volume per week from the Harvard Classics over one year; his grandmother owned a set and it never ocurred to him as a child that his grandmother might be more well-read than he realized. The Whole Five Feet chronicles Beha's reaction to his reading, his thoughts on the composition of the Classics, and how events from Beha's life impacted his reading during that year.

I want to say I liked this book. I really do, but the most reaction I can summon up is "It was okay." And that's kind of it, in my opinion. Beha's not a bad writer; he has a nice style and his aunt Mimi would be very proud of him because the chapters when he talks about his aunt and her terminal illness are very moving. I think I was expecting more along the lines of intellectual cross-examination interspersed with the memoir and musing on Charles Eliot's motivation in editing the Classics and there was at times some good criticism (the "Tintern Abbey" section is quite good) but I just didn't find it very interesting. In the Afterword Beha notes that he came to literature through a love of novels and he concentrated more in undergrad on contemporary fiction. I'd like to see what Beha would do with a book of essays about modern fiction.

Booking Through Thursday: Unread

"Booking Through Thursday" is hosted by Deb. In the perfect follow-up to last week’s question, as suggested by C in DC:

Is there a book that you wish you could “unread”? One that you disliked so thoroughly you wish you could just forget that you ever read it?

My immediate thought was, nope, I've not hated anything or wished it back enough to want the memory of reading a particular book gone from my mind. Then I started thinking back to things I perhaps had to read or forced myself to finish.

So, I admit, my number one, absolutely-wish-I-never-read-this-in-the-first-place is....The Grapes of Wrath. Surprised, right? Well, we had to read it in American Lit in high school(and since I was in the advanced program I was a sophomore and everyone else was a senior) and since the entire class was packed with senior slackers the teacher assigned a quiz per chapter. On every. Single. Chapter. It's enough to put one off reading permanently. I've read other Steinbeck's since then and liked them and I'm going to be braving The Grapes of Wrath for Connie's BNBC Classics group in July. I'd really like to "unread" that high school experience so I can start fresh.

Runners-up for the "wish I could unread this one" award are:

- Breaking Dawn (I was enjoying the series up to the last book - it seriously wasted my time - and I pretty much had to finish because of the "can my 10 yr old read these books" questions)

- Mr. Darcy's Daughters (bleck)

- some romance novel I found lying around my parents' house that I read because I was bored one day and the poorly written/badly imagined sex scenes are now burned into my memory (it doesn't get the big prize because I've managed to actually forget the title - it was a red mass market, not unusual for the romance genre)

What about you? Got a reading experience you'd rather remove from your brain with an ice pick?

One Lovely Blog Award

DeSeRt RoSe gave me a "One Lovely Blog Award" - thanks! This one's given to new blogs/blogging friends recently discovered.

I suspect that many of the blogs and people I follow already have this one (I'm rather late in the game to the book blogosphere), but I'll pass it on to a few I've recently found/discovered:

The Book Lady's Blog

I'm Lost in Books

Medieval Bookworm (and she's got a hysterical review of Breaking Dawn)

Thanks for the reviews and ideas!

Photographic Evidence

I love things that appear to be anachronistic (or actually are in many cases). I got a few pictures this weekend of random oddities I spotted. I almost never have a working camera on me and I only recently figured out how to get a few pictures off my BlackBerry so bear with me here.


Item #1: Even poetry aesthetes must look like soccer moms on the weekend.

A lovely, sedate silver minivan with the bumper sticker saying "I'd rather be reading Bukowski" spotted parked next to my car when I returned from fetching my dinner at Panera. That poor parent was probably being held captive in Hollister/Aerie/insert-name-of-overpriced-teen-clothing-store-here when he or she would probably rather be at the B&N in the mall. I was also amused because the van owner placed the sticker not on the bumper but at about shoulder height on the trunk hatch.

Item #2: Twilight has started invading all aspects of life.

This is a reading list for an English course in 18th Century British Literature, subtitled "Gothic Literature." I thought, "Cool - Gothic literature is fun to read," until I got to the last title. Can you see what it is? This picture is alot fuzzy because I had to snap it on the sly at Prairie Lights (the local independent bookstore - they sometimes take course orders from the humanities professors); this is also known as "Kinnearing" as developed by The Yarn Harlot. I ran it through the photo editor to enhance the contrast but if you still can't read it here's what the full course title and list says:

Title: Lit & Culture of 18th Cent Britain: Gothic Lit (there's a course number but it's cut off)
- The Castle of Otranto
- The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
- The Monk
- Northanger Abbey
- Dracula
- Twilight

I was stopped dead in my tracks. Literally. I was going to give them Northanger Abbey and Dracula even though Stoker was a number of years removed from the 18th century. But Twilight? Huh. So I went to the UI's ISIS system (I still take ballet, remember, so I have access to the course registration system) and pulled up the course decription. This is what it says:

"This course winds its way through the creepy classics of Gothic literature, from mid-eighteenth-century “graveyard poetry” and the first Gothic novel in English, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1767) to the contemporary blockbuster success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005).

En route, we’ll also experience Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), for which its author was threatened with charges of blasphemy, as well Jane Austen’s gentle ridicule of Gothic readers in Northanger Abbey (written 1798-99). We will consider why the Enlightenment gave rise to such dark literature and what this body of texts reveals about British culture, sexuality, family life, religion, and politics. Our study of the early Gothic novel will earn us the right to fast forward a bit a by the end. We will read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) pondering the meaning of the vampire for the Victorians, and we’ll finish inquiring about the legacy of the Gothic for us today as we read Meyer’s bestselling Twilight. We will also screen modern film adaptations of two or three of the texts we read, considering them as interpretations of the novels in their own right. Students will take quizzes, write two brief response papers, and make two presentations."

At least they're going to talk about the "legacy" of Gothic literature but is Twilight really necessary? Were I an undergrad in Enligsh, this one might have been a deal breaker for me; Twilight was an fun read but Bella does tend to make me gag just a bit. The class is only reading two early Gothics and one Gothic parody - not even an Ann Radcliffe - and they're skipping over a number of other Gothic novels to focus exclusively on the Vampire. If that was the focus, then perhaps the course could have been reformulated to focus on the Vampire from the beginning. I find it interesting that this course is listed without having any prerequisites so it feels more like a sot to get students to take a short summer course. If I took it the only things I'd need to read are the remainder of The Monk and the assigned essays in the Cambridge; I've read everything else. I also find it a little bizzaro-world that this course fulfills two areas of the English major:

"For English majors, AREA: Modern British Literature and Culture; PERIOD: 18th-Century Literature."

Say what? Only five novels, and one of them American, and this course still fulfills an area and a period? Oy.

Teaser Tuesday - The Link

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page (BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!) Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The very first people who were more or less like ourselves - who would not have attracted too many stares on today's public transportation - date from about five hundred thousand years ago. The earlier types are commonly called archaic, and some of them are ascribed to their own species, such as Homo heidelbergensis.
- The Link by Colin Tudge with Josh Young, p 199

I would also like to put in a plug for the History Channel's programme about Ida, the 47-million-year-old fossil described in The Link. It was a very well-done show, entertaining, too, so if you can watch it on a re-airing or via Internet you should do so.

Musing Mondays - Gift Certificates

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about gift certificates…

Do you give gift certificates to book stores as presents? If so, do you give for actual stores or online stores? Do you like to receive them yourself?

Yup. I do. My one brother and I read so much I think we've been passing the same $25 gift card back and forth for years because we can't always remember what the other owns or has read already - we're B&N shoppers (never had an occasion to use a gift card online) - even though this year I bought him a book (I hope he doesn't have it yet). I also like to give my other brother a B&N gift card; he's not always a book reader but he does like movies.

And if it's not already that obvious I love gift cards to bookstores. Eeee. Fun.

Snow Angels

I bought Stewart O'Nan's Snow Angels about a year ago intending to read it before watching the movie. As anyone with a massive TBR mountain knows, it's all about good intentions.

Kat got the movie via Netflix (she also had intended to read the book first, but never managed it) so Media_zombie and I went over, had some chicken burrito goodness, and watched Snow Angels with Kat and Aaron. It's a good movie, well-acted particularly on the parts of the actors playing Glenn and Annie (Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale), Amy Sedaris was fantastic in a non-comedy piece, and the movie seemed to be well-adapted but I couldn't be sure since I hadn't read the book. My only complaint is that the set dressers and stylists seemed to be doing a "retro revival" version of the 1970s because the sets and costumes looked eerily similar to modern retro 70s fashions and household items. None of the cars looked particularly period, Kate Beckinsale so did not have seventies hair (actually, none of the female characters did), and the Chinese restaurant didn't look terribly 1970s (and was run by a Russian? Greek? eastern European?). There only seemed to be hints of the 1970s - the television shows, vinyl and 8-tracks, the picture people at the mall, and the fact that everyone smoked (and everyone smokes in the boonies anyway, so that really didn't pin-point the era); a reference to putting fast food in the cafeteria makes the movie sound more 1990s but out in the sticks.

So I came home, dug out the book, and sat down to read a few chapters. Four hours later, at 430am, I finished the book and passed out for the night/morning. It's a good book; O'Nan really has a gift because he can wrap up a sad situation with everyday mundanities and make it compelling (Songs for the Missing was also like that). The characters are real, they all make mistakes, and they all have to feel their way through the muck of life with the rest of us. The three couples in the story act almost like a circle showing the destructive path of the relationships - Arthur and Lila are finding themselves and starting a first relationship; Arthur's mom and dad are in the process of divorce with the possibility of working things out or things may not work out at all; Annie and Glenn have a relationship that is irretrievably broken but they must still interact because of their daughter. There are beautiful passages where Glenn is praying, but the passages are also disturbing because the mind revealed in the prayers is not sound.

In contrast to the adaptation, the book is actually narrated by a grown-up Arthur and while that worked for the book I'm glad they didn't try to add that as a layer to the movie because there would have been too much distance between the audience and the characters. Other than that, David Gordon Green stuck quite close to the book's original plot line, beginning with the gunshots and backing up to tell the story leading up to that moment (Green has one major divergence with a plot line, and I don't quite like it now that I've read the book, but it's a spoiler and I won't be able to talk about it). The book is far more anchored in the 1970s with more pop-culture references, sports figures, music groups and the fixed time-period lends an understanding of how situations are handled. I find the movie endearing, not because of the horrifying aspects of Glenn and Annie's relationship, because Arthur is a band geek and Lila is a geeky girl and they are really, really cute together (I have a partiality to band geeks because I was one myself).

I really need to read some more O'Nan, particularly Last Night at the Lobster because that's been recommended to me more times than I can count, so he definitely goes on the front burner. I also highly recommend the motion picture adaptation of Snow Angels; it might be hard to watch if you're a mom but I think the acting performances are great and worth watching. This is an instance where I don't think it's necessary to read the book first.

Sexing the Cherry

I finished Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry nearly a week ago and I've been rolling this book around in my head since then. And quite a lot, too, which is rather odd for me to do with a novel (Randy Shilts's And The Band Played On followed me around in my head for weeks, mostly because I was pretty irritated about things I couldn't change). Sexing the Cherry is an odd novel, very unique....and I'm not sure quite what to do with it! You know, sometimes I read a book and I think, "OK, that was weird, on to the next" and then I start reading another book without another thought but in this case I feel like I need to read this another two or three times to understand the nuances.

StC is most definitely a book that requires further thought to get into all the layers (I've ordered a Vintage Living Texts book about Jeanette Winterson novels because I fully intend to read more of her work). The novel has very little plot beyond telling Jordan's story and even that is not really "plot-driven" as things go. The strength of the novel rests on Winterson's extraordinary description of Jordan's Stuart/Commonwealth/Restoration world and Winterson's fantastic invention, Jordan's mother (who I'm thinking isn't actually named in the book so I'll have to check on that for a re-read); Jordan's mother is like a fun-house mirror's version of a Shakespearean bawd and makes for really interesting reading. I was only partially surprised to find that Winterson was raised to be a fundamentalist/evangelical missionary (I'm not sure which) because the overly-pious clergy suffer very interesting fates in this book. Other themes I can indentify in StC include love, motherhood, family, sex, lesbianism, homosexuality, self-discovery, and environmentalism. Adding to the fantastical nature of the book is the fairy-tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, very cleverly woven into Jordan's story.

I'm going to have to apologize for the rather jumbled nature of the post. Everything is still ping-ponging around in my head. Since I borrowed the copy I read from the library I'll need to get my own so I can scribble in it, etc., on a re-read in the future. I'll get another go-round with Winterson later this summer when I read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with some friends.

Is that my ass?

My supremely awesome friend Kate has created a blog in which we, and all the friends we invite, may chronicle our adventures in battling the bulge or not becoming a chronic-disease statistic or whatever.

It is called "Is that my ass?" I totally love the name (and URL) and, unfortunately, I am totally forced to agree with the disbelieving tone because my posterior looks nothing like I want it to (probably never will). Most of my Be Healthy/diet/food problem posts will migrate in that direction. Come visit. Wish us well.