Teaser Tuesday: The Help

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

Just do the following:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

I drive my mama's Cadillac fast on the gravel road, headed home.  Patsy Cline can't even be heard on the radio anymore, for all the rocks banging on the side of the car.  Mother would be furious, but I just drive faster.
~ Chapter 5, The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help is my first nook purchase - not only is the book very enjoyable it was a smooth purchase and download.

'Tis the season: Part Three

Now we come upon that part of the Christmas shopping season where it becomes impossible to have any sort of real conversation with a customer without being interrupted by some other "customer" who "just has one question" (usually about the location of some other store in the mall or the store/mall hours).  Come on, people, kindergarten rules apply at all times, and unless your "question" is a medical emergency/lost child you need to wait your turn.

• I had a pair of very nice grandmas in (separately) buying books for their graddaughters (who are probably college-age judging by the wish lists); the first needed books by that "Gerald Lewis" guy who wrote the "Chronicles of Nautica" but not those books...there was one on divorce (errr, yeah, we've got all of CS Lewis's theological works); the second was looking for some "Chuck Pontiac" books but not the diary one (she bought a gift card instead once I summarized the plots of a few of Chuck Palahniuk's books, I tried to get her to buy Fight Club)
• some girl was sprawled out on the floor smack in the middle of our fiction section reading an ancient mass market - completely oblivious to the customers trying to shop around her; I finally had to tell her to find a chair after the customers complained she was blocking their access to the shelves and aisles (which she was - I had to step over her three times and she didn't take the hint)
• someone was looking for books on DIY taxidermy as a gift (I've got books on how to field dress and use all of your deer, but no taxidermy)
• this was the weekend before finals and the STUDENTS (grrr) were out in force hogging the tables and asking if we had their course textbooks in stock (which we don't for this reason); one girl even plugged her laptop into an outlet in some random corner of the store and left it there for at least three hours (I have never in my life been so tempted to take a customer's "abandoned" belongings and lock them in the office just to teach her a lesson)
• A lady about my age showed me the Twilight-themed Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights editions and asked if I knew anything about the books (only that they're like my favorite books ever, sheesh); I talked her out of those editions and into ones that were slightly cheaper and annotated (important when trying to decipher Joseph's ramblings in WH)

And, once again, I have an "I am not even remotely responsible for your homework" entry:

• a ninth-grader (maybe, she looked kind of young) showed me a copy of a teen paranormal fantasy/romance book and asked if it counted as science fiction (not really) because she has to write a book report about an SF novel; so I went and showed her all sorts of SF things (Ender's Game, Leviathan, Boneshaker, etc; I was pretty partial to Phillip K. Dick about her age) and then she says "But my teacher said we could use Twilight" in a snotty-pouty way (grrr, you know what, you asked me a question and I gave you an answer; if your teacher is willing to let you use Twilight then you're going to have to take up the question of appropriate choice of project with him/her; I don't think Twilight is SF at all, I'm completely not responsible for your homework, and I have more paying customers than I can shake a stick at right now; stop wasting my time)

PS: I probably logged 8-10 miles running up and down the store for 8 hours.  We got slammed.

My nook came (yippee!!)

I have always loved new toys.  Now that I'm a grown-up my "toys" are more of the techie kind.  Which means I decided to be a first-adopter for the first time and pre-ordered a nook.  It came on December 10 - just after we'd had a nasty snowstorm so I had a little early-Christmas-present fun.  I scampered home between the two jobs to rescue my precious package from my front door.

The nook, cover, and scratch kit were all very neatly packed into the box.  My pretty cover arrived (looking exactly like it's picture on the website) and to keep it from being crushed it came with a nook-sized insert:

The nook itself is very tightly packed into it's box:

There are instructions for getting nook out of the box but I'm glad it's packed so securely.  The nook itself is packed into a plastic case and then that case is taped onto a cardboard backing that holds it still in the box and then surrounded by bubble wrap.  Short of actually running over the box with a truck that's a pretty secure package.

That's nook still snapped to it's plastic backing after I managed to pry the plastic case apart (the hardest part of getting nook out but it didn't take very long.  It only took about 5 minutes to go from box to:

All ready to register and charge.  I called my nook "Borges" in honor of his short story The Library of Babel.  I'd been trying to find a good "library" name since nook is basically a repository of ebooks...and couldn't think of a better example than Borges.  The scratch kit went on without (much of) a hitch beyond my inability to actually put one of those films on something sans bubbles (oy) and the registration process was simple because it just logged right in with my BN.com account/password.  I've yet to do a purchase because I need to load a gift card into the ebook system but that should be pretty easy.

I just wish the outside of the nook box was as pretty as the inside of the box:

The Book of Air and Shadows

This is technically a DNF (did not finish).

I've been sitting on the hard cover of The Book of Air and Shadows for a while (since May 2007, actually) and the story seemed interesting to start. A lost Shakespeare manuscript ('tis the vogue for mysteries these days it seems), mobsters, creepy lawyers, paleography...seemed interesting.  So I thought.

Well, I forced myself to read the first 100 pages (through chapter 5) then did something I never do - I read the very last chapter. It was really more like an epilogue and I was completely unimpressed. There are two narrators (Jake-the-IP-lawyer narrates in the first person and there's a third-person narration for every scene not involving Jake) as well as the Bracegirdle "letters" which supposedly point toward the existence of a missing Shakespeare MS about Mary Queen of Scots. The story ping-pongs around and doesn't really go anywhere in those first 5 chapters to make me want to read more.

Also, those Bracegirdle letters don't seem very real to me. I've had to read letters from the English Civil War/Restoration period - those of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, Samuel Pepys - as well as the work of Robert Boyle and John Milton and when I compare the letters to what I've read the "made-up" ones strike a false note (a sore point with me, if you're going to have made-up sources they better look real which takes more than just atrocious spelling).

I'm not sure what the deal is with me and Shakespeare mysteries because I loathed Interred With Their Bones as well.

The Gargoyle

I've had The Gargoyle parked in my TBR/in-progress bin since it was released.  I was intrigued by the concept and since Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a favorite of mine I thought this would be a fun read.  I was a little incorrect.

It's not a very good read; the concept is particularly engaging but the actual writing does at times read like poorly executed pornographic film dialogue (perhaps that was the idea as the unnamed narrator is/was a rich man by way of the porn industry).  I really like the bones of this book - the intertwining of mysticism and death, the inclusion of the manuscript and sculpture work, the concept of physical versus spiritual beauty - but I feel like the narrative of the story got all jumbled. All the ancillary ghosts get all jumbled up with The Inferno and it doesn't quite make all that much sense. 

I keep thinking The Gargoyle was about 100 pages too long, that a great deal of the narrative meandering could have been streamlined. In the end, the major denoument of the story wasn't that hard to guess but it does leave more questions than answers - so not that satisfying. This book was supposed to be one of my favorites of 2008, a great story about a horribly burned porn star who becomes entangled with a questionably-sane woman who believes the two knew each other in 14-century Germany, but it just kept languishing on my TBR pile with a bookmark sticking out of the top, marking where I'd last gotten distracted.  An enforced snowday caused me to resurrect the poor thing and finish it off. 

Wordless Wednesday: To tree or not to tree

Teaser Tuesday: Illness

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


Just do the following:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

In order for us to understand the meaning of our existence we must first see our lives as a stretch from birth to death, or as essentially temporal.  We must understand our finitude on both sides, but especially our death, because that is where we are inexorably headed.
~ p 92, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh by Havi Carel

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

I really can't say much for a review about A Truth Universally Acknowledged, edited by Susannah Carson.  It's a very nice collection of thirty-four extant essays (plus a foreward by Harold Bloom) about Jane Austen's collected works.  The contributing authors run the gamut from the very literary (Bloom, Lionel Trilling (who appears twice), Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, and Virginia Woolf), to the somewhat literary (AS Byatt and Inges Sodre doing an "interview-style" essay, Susanna Clarke, C.S. Lewis, and and Rebecca Mead) to the popular (Amy Heckerling).  It's a very well-rounded collection and I enjoyed reading all the essays.  I even went off and ordered Lionel Trilling's collection The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent because I liked his two contributions and, if I liked his two contributions on Jane Austen, imagine what he has to say on other subjects (have I mentioned I got in an essay-reading kick lately?).

I do have a small complaint about this book and it's not even about the content.  It's about the arrangement of essays within the volume.  It took me quite a few essays to realize Carson had grouped them roughly by subject: general essays about Austen's work followed by essays on the Auten novels in order of publication and lastly a few speculative essays (Woolf's "Jane Austen at Sixty" is here).  I don't have any complaints about the arrangement itself but I would have preferred the groupings as printed headings on the contents page.  It helps my transitions between essays if I know why things are arranged as such.

But overall, if you're an Austen freak (like me) this is a must-have book of Austen criticism.  It looks nice up on the shelf next to my volume of Austen's letters.

Bookspotting: December 4, 2009

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson
Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham

It's a pretty thin crowd (on an early bus due to the need to leave town this evening) and nearly everyone else is on a cell phone.

And what was I reading? A Truth Universally Acknowledged edited by Susannah Carson

Wordless Wednesday: Baked Kitty

OMG, BOOKS!!!!!

I came home after working all day, and chilling with Jackie and Eric at BW3 after, to find a little surprise:

I don't think the doormat is doing a very good job of hiding the pile....

And what was in those boxes?

The two big boxes contained 32 Best American series trade paperbacks - it was my Alibris order (the smallest box was my Dad's Christmas present)!  I so rule at bargain shopping; 32 trade paperbacks @ $1.99 apiece + free shipping from Alibris - 15% off coupon = $53.  Booyah!!  I'm most excited about:

Edited by Margaret Atwood (squeee).  And:

The first Best American Essays volume from 1986.  This is the most marked-up volume I got (from the Catalina High School library in Tuscon, Arizona - there's a bookplate and library markings all over it) but I wasn't going to argue about it for an out-of-print volume that is surprisingly in good condition otherwise with only one crease in the spine.  The other volumes look fairly unread, which is kind of sad when I think about it (and, strangely, each book had a printed manifest tucked into the front cover, with a coupon off my next order from Alibris...I now have 32 coupons to use by February 2010, haha).

Also included in the packages today was a small, unmarked plain white air-mail bubble envelope with no return address.  Little did I know it contained a surprise from the UK:

Rebecca Skloot had sent out a tweet requesting readers/reviewers for Havi Carel's book Illness: The Cry of the Flesh a few weeks ago and I decided to tweet Rebecca back and get Dr. Carel's information.  Dr. Carel is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England in Bristol and Illness looks at the philosophy of illness as part of "The Art of Living Series" from Acumen Publishing; she also weaves her own story into the book as a sufferer of lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM).  This is the first review copy I personally requested - I wasn't offered it first - and I feel very (lucky? privileged?) to receive a copy from "across the pond"; I can't wait to get started.

I have sooo many new books to read!!!!!!  If my nook had come today I think I might have burst from book-love!  I certainly wouldn't be able to sleep - too much to look at.

******EDIT:  In my super-excitement (and overly tired state), I completely forgot to list the books because it's not like you can read all the spines.  So I received:
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 edited by Dave Eggers
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 edited by David Quammen
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 edited by Stephen Pinker
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005 edited by Jonathan Weiner
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007 edited by Richard Preston
The Best American Essays 1986 edited by Elizabeth Hardwick
The Best American Essays 1987 edited by Gay Talese
The Best American Essays 1989 edited by Geoffrey Wolff
The Best American Essays 1990 edited by Justin Kaplan
The Best American Essays 1991 edited by Joyce Carol Oates
The Best American Essays 1992 edited by Susan Sontag
The Best American Essays 1993 edited by Joseph Epstein
The Best American Essays 1994 edited by Tracy Kidder
The Best American Essays 1995 edited by Jamaica Kincaid
The Best American Essays 1996 edited by Geoffrey C. Ward
The Best American Essays 1997 edited by Ian Frazier
The Best American Essays 1998 edited by Cynthia Ozick
The Best American Essays 1999 edited by Edward Hoagland
The Best American Essays 2001 edited by Kathleen Norris
The Best American Essays 2002 edited by Stephen Jay Gould (confession: I actually used to own a copy of this, purchased solely because of the essay "Welcome to Cancerland" by Barbara Ehrenreich....but seem to have lost it some time ago)
The Best American Essays 2003 edited by Anne Fadiman
The Best American Essays 2004 edited by Louis Menand
The Best American Essays 2006 edited by Lauren Slater
The Best American Short Stories 1989 edited by Margaret Atwood
The Best American Short Stories 1997 edited by E. Annie Proulx
The Best American Short Stories 1999 edited by Amy Tan
The Best American Short Stories 2000 edited by E.L. Doctorow
The Best American Short Stories 2001 edited by Barbara Kingsolver
The Best American Short Stories 2002 edited by Sue Miller
The Best American Short Stories 2003 edited by Walter Mosley
The Best American Short Stories 2004 edited by Lorrie Moore
The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King

Looking at each volume individually, I am very surprised at how little wear is present on some of the older volumes.

Teaser Tuesday: The Complete Stories

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


Just do the following:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers
 

Mrs. May stopped still, one hand lifted to her throat.  The sound was so piercing that she felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her.
~ p 316, The Complete Stories, "Greenleaf", Flannery O'Connor