MarysLibrary

I'd Buy without Looking

Someone in my online Trollope group mentioned in an email the other day a list he made of authors whose books he would buy without so much as looking at the book. That strikes me as a revealing sort of list. I would include on the list authors whose books I request from the library without regard to their subject.

Here are some of my Buy (or Borrow) without Looking authors:

• Michael Chabon
• Thomas Sowell
• Barbara Brooks Wallace (children's books)
• Robert Caro
• Jess Walter
• Diana Abu-Jaber
• Nancy Pearl
• Henry Petroski
• Nicky Epstein (knitting books)
• Debbie Stoler (knitting books)
• Lalita Tademy
• Timothy Egan
• James Webb
• Edmund Morris
• Elizabeth George
• Tobias Wolff
• James Q Wilson
• Juan Williams
• Rebecca Pawel
• Julia Spencer-Flemming
• Hermione Lee
• Fran Lebowitz
• Dennis Lehane

Another Book Meme

I picked up this meme from Life Must Be Filled Up. It's a list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Here are my results.

Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

A New Approach to the Sunday Book Reviews

For many years I've read the book reviews in the Sunday papers, especially the New York Times Book Review, and either written down the titles of books I find interesting, gone online to request them from the library, or even bought one or two of them.

But then I had to find a copy of the book somewhere, get it from the library, or wait for amazon.com to deliver it. No longer.

This morning I went through the reviews, picked out the books I was interested in and requested samples of them from amazon. Within two-minutes, sure enough, the first chapter or two of each book was awaiting me on my Kindle.

Instant gratification! So American!

Today I read samples of the new Thomas Sowell book, Economic Facts and Fallacies. I'll probably buy that book as I own most of Sowell's books. I took a look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I'll pass on that one. Too much profanity, exceedingly unappealing characters, and too much Spanish that I suspect is as profane as the English.

I read the first chapter of Fashion Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones. That didn't grab me. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes did. I kept that along with the other books that look particularly interesting and will decide among them when I finish the book I'm reading now.

My Kindle is changing the way I read and buy books. It may even help me get control of my reading list.

A Few of My Favorite Blogs . . .

Letters from a Hill Farm is one of those blogs that you find yourself checking more than once a day because of Nan's faithfulness in posting often and the delightful glimpse she gives you into life on a Northern New England farm.

Yesterday she planted two 25-ft rows of peas and made corn muffins. A week ago she showed us some photos of intriguing sculpture at a New Hampshire museum. On April 18 she reviewed Reeve Lindburgh's new book, Forward from Here.

Letters from a Hill Farm always has a great photo at the top. Right now it's the naughty looking goat you see above. Check it out.

Briar Rose

I recently read a post by Robin at A Fondness for Reading about a Jane Yolen book, Briar Rose (1992). When I happened upon my copy a day or so later I sat down and read it.

Robin's review, which she posted on the 14th of April, and Jane Yolen's website provide lots of information about the book and why Yolen wrote it. And Robin has found a spectacular photo of a stained glass window called Briar Rose by Michael Stokes to illustrate her review.

I think of Jane Yolen as a children's book writer. Briar Rose, however, is an adult novel. It has one of the most cleverly woven plots I've seen in recent years, with the details of the modern story of a young woman searching for her grandmother's past and those of the fairy tale (also known as Sleeping Beauty) cleverly matched.

The book is short and can be read quickly. It will stay with you forever.

Pun

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

.

The Awakening

It's been a long time since I last read the shockingly modern novel by Kate Chopin, The Awakening, which was published in 1898. I liked it when I read it years ago. I loved it when I read it again recently.

I had forgotten the plot, except that the protagonist becomes dissatisfied with her life and moves from her husband's house into a small establishment of her own. I couldn't remember why she "awoke" or what exactly that meant.

It turns out it's about many kinds of awakening, not the least of which is the dawning awareness that she is a person, separate from her family, her husband, her children, the social world in which she moves -- in never-ending circles.

I had, above all, forgotten how beautifully it was written. The story takes place in New Orleans and in the islands south of there near New Iberia. The weather is usually hot, the humidity is terrible, the mosquitoes are a never-absent torment. The women wear white and carry parasols. The men wear white and languish about flirting in a desultory way with the women. Black servants do all the work, including minding the children. Everything happens in slow motion.

I'm going to put this on my list of books to re-read periodically. It was far ahead of its time when it was published and it's not going out of fashion any time soon.

The Secret of Harry Potter

[The success of the Harry Potter books] says that in an age when technology is king and the future of publishing often seems uncertain, words printed on pages bound together with glue and thread still have the power to thrill and delight readers. -- James Cross Giblin

From The Book Lover's Cookbook by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen

Will It Never End?

Reading List Update

Books I've read since last update:

Sonnets 40-42 by William Shakespeare (read 4/14/08)

Sonnets 43-45 by William Shakespeare (read 4/16/08)

Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope (1861) Chapters 27-32 (read 4/13/08)

Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope (1861) Chapters 33-38 (read 4/20/08)

The Magician's Nephew by C S Lewis (1955) 202 pages (read 4/11/08 ****)

Theodore Roosevelt (The American Presidents Series) by Louis Auchincloss (2001) 155 pages (read 4/12/08 ***)

Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber (2007) (read on Kindle 4/19/08 ****)

Ferragus: Chief of the Devorants by Honore de Balzac (1833) 133 pages (read 4/15/08 **)

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899) 134 pages (read 4/17/08 ***)

Books I'm reading now:

• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905) 347 pages
• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll (2004) 717 pages
• Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R Gordon and General Bernard E Trainor (2006) 603 pages
• Shakespeare's Sonnets (The Arden Shakespeare) edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones () 488 pages
• The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler (1997) 672 pages
• Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (volume 1) by Taylor Branch (1988) 1064 pages
• Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, volume 3) by Robert Caro (2002) 1167 pages
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross (2007) 624 pages
• Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South by Thomas F Schaller (2006) 336 pages
• A History of the English People by Paul Johnson (1985) 466 pages
• Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber (2004)
• What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) 306 pages
• Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- And the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller (2008) Kindle

Books to read soon:

• The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell (1955) 214 pages
• At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell () pages
• Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (1042) 286 pages
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (2008) 280 pages
• Out of This Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor in America by Thomas Bell (1941) 424 pages
• The Salt Line by Elizabeth Spencer (1984) pages
• Where Does the Money Go? Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis by Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson (2008) 320 pages
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (1979) 886 pages
• The Darling Buds of May by H E Bates (1958) 117 pages
• A Breath of French Air by H E Bates (1959) 112 pages
• When the Green Woods Laugh by H E Bates (1960) 100 pages
• Fair Stood the Wind for France by H E Bates (1944) 270 pages
• Young Pattullo by J I M Stewart (1975) 317 pages
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis (1950) 189 pages
• Lush Life by Richard Price (2008) 455 pages
• Sonnets 46-48 by William Shakespeare
• Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope (1861) chapters 39-44
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
• Briar Rose by Jane Yolen (1992) 200 pages