Books - Posie wants to work at DeVille Bookstore!

One of the book club members has a adorable dog named Posie.

Everyone loves Posie soooo much, that when the walker and the feeder (Posie's parents) were going on vacation, people were fighting over who would doggie sit Miss Posie!

Posie loooves to hang out at the bookstore. Read her thoughts here!

Enjoy the rest of your day!

Books - Members (Vote for books) - Fellow Bloggers (Please comment)

The International Fiction Book Group members have submitted their selections.

Members, please vote for ten (10) books and send the title of your choices to workingwords100@yahoo.com.

Voting period - December 4th to December 20th.

Bloggers - Please make comments about any selections.

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Fiction - Russians in US

Absurdistan by Gary Sheyngart

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

“Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive.”

–Aleksandar Hemon From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comes the uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country
Meet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA (don’t even ask), and patriot of no country save the great City of New York. Poor Misha just wants to live in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost.
Salvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century.
With the enormous success of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart established himself as a central figure in today’s literary world—“one of the most talented and entertainingwriters of his generation,” according to The New York Observer. In Absurdistan, he delivers an even funnier and wiser literary performance. Misha Vainberg is a hero for the new century, a glimmer of humanity in a world of dashed hopes.

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Fiction - Asia

The Black Book Orhan Pamuk Nobel Prize winner 2006

Guardian Interview

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband, Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl 's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

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Fiction – Oceania and Australasia

Bone People by Keri Hulme

1985 Man Booker notes

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that "to care for anything is to invite disaster." Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character's thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment.

Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand as it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.

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Fiction – Oceania and Australasia

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Barnes and Noble - Synopsis

Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire.

Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.

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Non-fiction - Africa

Don't let's go to the dogs tonight: an African childhood by Alexandra Fuller

Guardian Review

Barnes and Noble synopsis

With Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, her dazzling debut recounting an unconventional childhood in war-ravaged Africa, Alexandra Fuller put a unique spin on the traditional memoir, sharing what is only part of her fascinating life story. Her follow-up, Scribbling the Cat, continues the unique look at her life.

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Non fiction - Europe and Asia

Eat pray love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Barnes & Noble Synopsis

Oddly but aptly titled, Eat, Pray, Love is an experience to be savored: This spiritual memoir brims with humor, grace, and scorching honesty. After a messy divorce and other personal missteps, Elizabeth Gilbert confronts the "twin goons" of depression and loneliness by traveling to three countries that she intuited had something she was seeking. First, in Italy, she seeks to master the art of pleasure by indulging her senses. Then, in an Indian ashram, she learns the rigors and liberation of mind-exalting hours of meditation. Her final destination is Bali, where she achieves a precarious, yet precious equilibrium. Gilbert's original voice and unforced wit lend an unpretentious air to her expansive spiritual journey.

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Fiction - Europe

The Gathering - Anne Enright

Booker Prize notes

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Anne Enright is a dazzling writer of international stature and one of Ireland’s most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him—something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is a daring, witty, and insightful family epic, clarified through Anne Enright’s unblinking eye. It is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

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Fiction Africa and Europe

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Interview from the Guardian

From Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Doris Lessing, Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

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Fiction – Oceania and Australasia

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan
This book won the 2002 Commonwealth Best Book prize for SE Asia and South Pacific

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

"The novel from author Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish is a tragicomic tapestry of nineteenth-century Australia, a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish." Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before all the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Sarah Island penal colony of Van Diemen's Land - now Tasmania. A talented phony and art forger, Gould was enlisted by the prison doctor Lempriere to get him into the Royal Society by painting a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled. Foolish Billy Gould, invader of Australia, thief, liar, and murderer, lived to bear witness to horror and ridicule, and to miracles.

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Non-fiction – Asia

Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure by Sarah McDonald

The Barnes & Noble
Feisty, outspoken Sarah Macdonald made a firm decision after backpacking through India in her 20s: She would never return. India was a land of filth and desperation, and she was nearly free of it when, as she prepared to board her plane back to her Australian homeland, a beggar read her palm and declared that she'd be back; the next time, for love.

And indeed, 12 years later, Macdonald abandons a successful career as a journalist to join her true love in teeming, polluted, noisy New Delhi. Shortly after her arrival, a bout with double pneumonia leaves her near death, but Macdonald handles her illness, as she does all her encounters, with an acerbic wit and acute powers of observation. But her experience yields a powerful lesson, and Macdonald returns to health with a newfound sense of mission: She must find peace in the only possible place -- within.

For the next two years, Macdonald makes friends with a colorful cast of locals who educate her in the ways of their country. Seeking enlightenment and adventure, she visits gurus, attends religious festivals, and meditates, traveling to fantastic locales along the way. But in the end (holy cow!) Macdonald's most important spiritual breakthrough comes courtesy of a most unlikely source: her own heart. Our readers gave Holy Cow 16 Shiva thumbs up! (Summer 2004 Selection)

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Fiction – Latin America

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea

2006 Kiriyama Book Prize

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Miracles and passion abound in this mesmerizing novel--hailed everywhere as a masterwork--the story of a remarkable young woman's sudden sainthood in the revolutionary-era Mexico of the late 19th century.

Author Biography: Luis Alberto Urrea is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, a Western States Book Award, and a Colorado Book Award, and has been inducted into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. He lives in Chicago.

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Fiction – Middle East

The Liberated Bride by AB Yehoushua

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Yohanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.

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Non-fiction Europe

My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child's years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found 'her true calling.'

From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre in the fall of 1948 and Julia watched the well-muscled stevedores unloading the cargo to the first perfectly soigné meal that she and her husband, Paul, savored in Rouen en route to Paris, where he was to work for the USIS, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon this tall, outspoken gal from Pasadena, California, who didn't speak a word of French and knew nothing about the country, was steeped in the language, chatting with purveyors in the local markets, and enrolled in the Cordon Bleu.

After managing to get her degree despite the machinations of the disagreeable directrice of the school, Julia started teaching cooking classes herself, then teamed up with two fellow gourmettes, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, to help them with a book they were trying to write on French cooking for Americans. Throwing herself heart and soul into making it a unique and thorough teaching book, only to suffer several rounds of painful rejection, is part of the behind-the-scenes drama that Julia reveals with her inimitable gusto and disarming honesty.

Filled with the beautiful black-and-white photographs that Paul loved to take when he was not battling bureaucrats, as well as family snapshots, this memoir is laced with wonderful stories about the French character, particularly in the world of food, and the way of life that Julia embraced so wholeheartedly. Above all, she reveals the kind of spirit and determination, the sheer love of cooking, andthe drive to share that with her fellow Americans that made her the extraordinary success she became.

Le voici. Et bon appétit!

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Fiction - Europe

Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Man Booker Shortlist 2005

From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.

As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.

And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now.

A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

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Non-fiction Middle East

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Guardian book review

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

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Fiction - Europe

Siegfried by Harry Mulisch

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

A bracing meditation on the nature of evil and a moving evocation of the humanheart, Siegfried is one of Harry Mulisch's most powerful novels. After a reading of his work, renowned Dutch author Rudolf Herter, who had recently commented in a television interview that it may be only through fiction that the uniquely evil figure of Adolf Hitler can be truly comprehended, is approached by an elderly couple. The pair reveal that as domestic servants in Hitler's Bavarian retreat in the waning years of the war, they were witness to the jealously guarded birth of Siegfried—the son of Hitler and Eva Braun. For more than fifty years they have kept silent about the child they once raised as their own. Only now and only to Herter are they willing to reveal their astonishing story. nice twists while investigating how Hitler's endgame might have looked from down the hall. (The Philadelphia Inquirer) Times)

Author Biography: Harry Mulisch is author of the international bestsellers The Assault, The Discovery of Heaven, and The Procedure, as well as other novels, short stories, essays, poetry, plays, and philosophical works.

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Fiction - Europe

Star of the Sea – Joseph O’Connor

Guardian book review

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by famine and injustice, the Star of the Sea sets sail for NewYork. On board are hundreds of refugees, some optimistic, many more desperate. Among them are a maid with a devastating secret, the bankrupt Lord Merridith, his wife and children, and a killer stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution.

This journey will see many lives end, others begin anew. Passionate loves are tenderly recalled, shirked responsibilities regretted too late, and profound relationships shockingly revealed. In this spellbinding tale of tragedy and mercy, love and healing, the farther the ship sails toward the Promised Land, the more her passengers seem moored to a past that will never let them go.

As urgently contemporary as it is historical, this exciting and compassionate novel builds with the pace of a thriller to a stunning conclusion.

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Fiction - Europe

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Bookgirl’s review

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

The first English publication of Suite Française will be a major event. Suite Française is an extraordinary novel of life under Nazi occupation - recently discovered and published 64 years after the author's death in Auschwitz.

In the early 1940s, Irène Némirovsky was a successful writer living in Paris. But she was also Jewish, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Her two small daughters, aged 5 and 13, escaped, carrying with them, in a small suitcase, the manuscript - one of the great first-hand novelistic accounts of a way of life unravelling.

Part One, "A Storm in June," is set in the chaos of the tumultuous exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. As the German army approaches, Parisians seize what belongings they can and flee the city, the wealthy and the poor alike searching for means to escape. Thrown together under circumstances beyond their control, a group of families and individuals with nothing in common but the harsh demands of survival find themselves facing the annihilation of their world, and human nature is revealed for what it is - sometimes tender, sometimes terrifying. Part Two, "Dolce," is set in a German-occupied village near Paris, where, riven by jealousy and resentment, resistance and collaboration, the lives of the townspeople reveal nothing less than the essence of the French identity. The delicate, secret love affair between a German soldier and the French woman in whose house he has been billeted plays out dangerously against the background of Occupation.

Suite Française is both a piercing record of its time, and a humane, profoundly moving work of art. Riveting, impossible to put down, it makes us witnesses to life as it was in wartime France, and leaves us wondering how we too might behave in such a perilous situation.

An immediate #1 bestseller in France, Suite Française has captured readers' imaginations not only for the tragic story of its author, and the circumstances of its rediscovery, but for its brilliantly subtle and compelling portrait of France under Occupation.

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Fiction – Asia

Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra

Shortlist for Impac Prize 2006

Barnes and Nobel Synopsis

Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, who was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair.
Desperate, exhausted Mohsen wanders through Kabul when he is surrounded by a crowd about to stone an adulterous woman. Numbed by the hysterical atmosphere and drawn into their rage, he too throws stones at the face of the condemned woman buried up to her waist. With this gesture the lives of all four protagonists move toward their destinies.
The Swallows of Kabul is a dazzling novel written with compassion and exquisite detail by one of the most lucid writers about the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world. Yasmina Khadra brings readers into the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.

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Non-fiction – Asia and Europe

Sword and Blossom by Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams

Matt’s review

Barnes and Noble

Sword and Blossom tells the tragic true story of an extraordinary love affair that began when a young Army officer fell in love with a Japanese woman in the early years of the twentieth century. Based on a treasure trove of more than eight hundred letters, it chronicles Arthur Hart-Synnot and Masa Suzuki's attempts to make a life together despite long periods of separation, racial prejudice, and political turbulence. Their doomed relationship, like that of their countries, was part of a confused age of extremes and contradictions, of violence and beauty, and of destinies etched out amid the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

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Fiction - Europe and USA

Three Junes - Julia Glass

National Book Award speech by Julia Glass

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret
sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Paul’s death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his family’s future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements—until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.
Love in its limitless forms—between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children—is the force that moves these characters’ lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorioustriptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the heart—how family ties, both those we’re born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy.

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Fiction - Europe

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

Guardian book review

Barnes and Noble Synopsis

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners, scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed, and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect crime.

With his superb narrative skills, Erik Larson guides these parallel narratives toward a relentlessly suspenseful meeting on the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate. Thunderstruck presents a vibrant portrait of an era of séances, science, and fog, inhabited by inventors, magicians, and Scotland Yard detectives, all presided over by the amiable and fun-loving Edward VII as the world slid inevitably toward the first great war of the twentieth century. Gripping from the first page, and rich with fascinating detail about the time, the people, and the new inventions that connect and divide us, Thunderstruck is splendid narrative history from a master of the form.

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Fiction - Asia

Waiting - Ha Jin

Ha Jin's speech for winning National Book Award

Barnes and Noble synopsis

Waiting is a story of long-suffering love between a dutiful married doctor, Lin Kong, and an unmarried nurse, Manna Wu, he meets while working in a Chinese army hospital. Lin wants to divorce his wife, Shuyu, and marry Manna. He approaches his wife about a divorce several times, but each time she refuses. A loophole in Chinese law will allow Lin to divorce her, without her consent, if they are separated for 18 years. The "waiting" for Lin's divorce is the focus of the story.

Jin uses spare but compelling prose to move the relationship between Lin and Manna through almost two decades. Despite the dramatic setting — comunist China in the 1960's — the political and cultural aspects of the story are secondary to the emotional architecture of Lin and Manna's relationship.

Books - New Site for comparison shopping

I received an email from Lucy of BooksPrice.com

This site compares the prices from several sources. Not only can you find the prices for books, but also DVDs, CDs, and textbooks.

If you really, really are impatient about ordering a specific title, Booksprice.com has RSS feeds.

For letting you know about this new site, Lucy is sending me a book: The Gathering by Ann
Enright, the recent Man Booker Prize winner.

Please pass the word about this site.

Stuff - Illustration Friday - Scale

A mutant multi-SCALED fish will SCALE up the mountain (SCALE of mountain on the left) while practicing her musical SCALES.

Books - Updates on Challenges

I am a little restless. I am juggling lots of books right now. But, that's OK. When it gets cooler, I have more energy.

I found a copy of Hunt for the Red October, so I am adding another book to the Seafaring Challenge. I am also reading a story about the Shakleton expedition to the South Pole. So, I should be an Admiral Level soon!

I have decided to join two more: The Expanding Horizon Challenge and What's in a Name? Reading Challenge.

I haven't made up the list yet, but you will know.

In the Russian challenge, I started reading about the invasion of Moscow by the Germans in 1941. That winter was bad, bad.

Of course, all of the books that I am reading is from my stacks.

And, congratulate me. I am the Literature Reviewer for The Goddess in You, a UK site for women, written by women! Click on Reviews, Literature, and voila!

Have a great week!

Stuff - Preemie Hats

A few weeks ago, I was furiously working on these little hats for premature babies.

The challenge: working in the round with two circular needles. I had never done either technique.

So, the first hat was the "Harry Potter" hat on the bigger, red Teletubbie (Po).

I got better as time went on. They finally came out somewhat round.

The hats were made for a challenge between two knitting stores. I gave my hats to a knitting group member, so she could get points at the New Orleans store.

Simply Knitting has a pattern in which the hats are not made in the round.

If you ever want to try this, check out your hospital's website to find out how to contribute. You must use cotton, because the babies' head are super sensitive.

Books - Book Review - This Cold Heaven - Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is an author who really wants a full experience. When she writes about a place or a people, she immerses herself with the environment or culture. She doesn't stay in a motel. She eats what the natives eat, trying to understand everyone in the place. In this book, she spends months at one time over several years in Greenland;one year, she goes there to spend the winter. A brave lady! Even though this book was published in 2001, early effects of global warming were being seen. The weather is becoming more severe; it's difficult to hunt in kayaks, so boats with outboard motors may start to be used, and traditional hunting methods may be forgotten. Bird hunting will be done more than mammal hunting. There is also more wind in the summer. (I recently read an article that reported trees growing in Greenland.)

This work combines several plots: Ehrlich’s observations of the Inuit of Greenland, historical accounts of previous explorers, scientific facts, and Ehrlich’s musings of her state of mind upon encountering the environment of this country.

In terms of facts, these are things that I learned throughout my reading, which Ehrlich presented in very interesting ways:

· By eating seal meat, which has vitamin C and protein, the Inuit prevent scurvy. They don’t need to have citrus fruits.

· The Inuit were communal people, living in long, rectangular homes, until the Danish missionaries introduced the idea of the nuclear family.

· Private ownership of land doesn’t exist. However, you can own your own home, but the village must approve its location. If your home blocks someone’s view of the water, your permit could be rejected.

· Pure-blooded Inuit don’t exist in Greenland. Most have some Danish blood. Descendants of Artic explores Peary and Henson live there today.

· An American artist, Rockwell Kent, became the Artic Gaugin. He drew landscapes in the early 1900s, had children, and wrote a book about Greenland.

· People in some villages eat eggs one month annually; in the summer, they eat some of the eggs that birds lay in nests.

· The Artic wooly bear caterpillar takes 20 years to become a butterfly.

. Siorapaluk is the most northern, continuously populated village.

In 1998, she joins hunters in the spring. Despite being dressed “head to toe in sealskin pants and anoraks with fox-fur ruffs…(near) Unknown Island, the weather worsened. A ground blizzard stirred. Bits of ice, like tiny continents..Wind-driven ice tore at the dogs. Their feet and legs were bleeding and their muzzles were encrusted.”

Talking to weatherman, Thyge Anderson, in Thule, she finds out that icicles flying around in a blizzard can kill people, and that a man died of asphyxiation when he was outside during a storm.

(This counts for the Seafaring Challenge. I am now CAPTAIN Isabel. See the entire list.)

But, not all is so dire. In July 1996, while on a ship with Nikolai and Kristian, she writes, “We entered a forest of icebergs. The path was chrome and slate, a mirror that did not reflect…Artic gulls shrieked, rising up, looking for food. The glazed wing of an iceberg caught light. From one translucent arch, a row of blue tears fell.” Many hours later, “Glass is what the boat cut through as we continued north. The sea was indigo-it stood for night, which had fallen from the sky. A line of silver demarcated blue water from blue cliff, and there a thin band of haze rose. I wonder why anyone came to Unknown Island, anyone at all.”

In her readings about explorers, Ehrlich was very interested in Knud Rasmussen, a Greenlander with Danish blood. He went from Greenland to Port Hope, Alaska, collecting myths of all the Inuits on the way in the early 1900s.

While in Simpson Striat, Alaska, he discovers that ferries are made of caribou skins sewn together and stuffed with rugs and old clothes. Two boats are lashed together, which can hold 30 people.

In 1871, the Polaris is in danger of being crushed by ice. 12 men, 2 women and children get off the ship, but the ice that they are on breaks away. From October to April, all those people live on the ice floe. They eat seal meat and use seal fat for light. A child is even born on this ice floe. Everyone spent 193 in close quarters, traveling 1300 miles in open waters, before being picked up by another ship!

The book has excellent illustrations and maps to help you follow Ehrlich’s voyages and her thoughts on everyone who befriended her.

How many authors immerse themselves in cultures as totally as Ehrlich? Not many.

Join her and learn more about Greenland by reading this book.

Books and Good Stuff

The good Stuff - first
I finally have internet access at home, after not having it for 5 weeks. Yeah.

I have a lot of updating to do on this blog, like linking all my recent book reviews to my review list.

It's cool enough to start knitting sweaters with ALPACA from Wyoming. I bought the October issue of Simply Knitting and I found a great pattern (the green one). I now need to buy size 000 needles to get the gauge right!

I am co-hosting the next season haiku blog. Many new poets are signing up. It's exciting to correspond with people all over the world! I hope that I can wear some thick clothes soon, so I can get in the mood for writing about winter.

Books - I will join another challenge: The Hometown Challenge.
I am reading Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children-- and other streets of New Orleans in words and pictures by John Chase.

I have been invited to join another group blog, The Goddess in You. I will do the book review section.

Have a fun week!

Book - Book Review - Star of the Sea - Joseph O'Connor

I am now a First Rank: Lieutenant ("Leftenant") for the Seafaring Challenge. The Star of the Sea is about the journey of Irish People to New York on a wooden ship during the time of the great Potato Famine of the 1840s.

The novel has entries from the Captain's log about the latitude/longitude of the ship/number of deaths and his observations of all the passengers and his thoughts about the poor Irish.

I also read about the lives of the passengers from the same village: Mary, Mulvey, and Lord Kingscourt (before, during, and fleeing the famine and the reasons).

A report from the journalist Dixon, provides a historical overview of the events in Irleand.

There is also a murder mystery story.

The novel is written in an old-fashioned way. In the beginning of each chapter, the reader has a hint of what will happen. There are also many illustrations from the papers of the times. (Be prepared for racist comments and drawings of the Irish from some Englishmen.)

The ship does reach New York, but a lot happens in the journey of 28? days.

David Meredith is going to New York to provide design of grand homes to the wealthy. He writes to his sister, "I know that some say the fashion at New York in the coming decades will be to build upwards into the clouds, but having studied the whole matter at considerable length I am absolutely certain that this is fanciful nonsense. If there is one thing they have in America it is land..They will always build outward and never up..." Poor David was wrong on NY's building plans, but mostly correct about the rest of the country.

In Chapter XIX, Mulvey recalls when he left Connemara and walks to Belfast to work on the docks (many years before his voyage to New York). "Raised in the practically incestuous closeness of Connemara, Mulvey found the anonymity of the city a bliss...The exquiste silence of the city late at night. To saunter the ways of the sleeping metropolis; to hear your echoed footsteps on black, wet stone; to catch sight of the distant moonlit hills through a gap at the end of a terraced street, before heading back to your dockside hut with a bottle. It seemed to Pius Mulvey the life of god." Besides the bottle and hut, this is a lovely description of the freedom of living in a city. He should be able to do well in NYC.

Depending on which class you occupied on the ship and whether you were on a voyage or working, the viewpoint of the trip differs.

The Captain started all his logs with the longtitude, latitude, days left on the trip, and the names and hometowns of the dead passengers, mostly from third class. He also recorded his thoughts on the plight of the poor Irish.

He also admired the cook, Henry Li, for coming up with an idea of feeding the Irish immigrants (it seems that 3rd class people were responsible for bringing their own food; it was not provided with the price of the ticket.)

He proposed "putting the bone, gristle, rinds, and suchlike but sometimes fats or the skins of fish (leftovers from first class plates)...to stem them down to a soup to be given to the hungry.."

The crew tells the Captain about a strange smell. "I don't not mean the usual odour emanating from steerage where the poor must contend as well as they can; but something much worse and quite pestilential. It beggars description." A few days later, the Bosun saw many rats "congregating in the sewage gully channel leading from First Class quarters." And they found the source of the smell: two, dead stowaways.

A doctor recorded a list of illnesses that the 3rd Class people suffered: diarrhea, colds, fevers, lice, scurvy, dysentery, etc, because they ate only buiscuits and drank water and han no clean place to cook or clean themselves.

He did go on and on about minor illnesses of First Class passengers; he seemed to care about these people more than the poor.

In Chapter XIV, Grantley Dixon, a journalist, is so poetic about the voyage. During a storm, "... music of the ship ws howling around him. The low whistlings; the tortured rumbles, the wheezy sputters of breeze flowing through it. The clatter of loose wainscoting. The clank of chains. The groaning of the boards. The blare of the wind. It seemed to spew from the clouds, not merely to fall. He watched the waves rise up from a quarter of a mile away. Rolling. Foaming. Rushing, Surging. Beginning to thicken and swell in strength. Now it was a battle of ink-black water, almost crumbling under its weight...

Sounds so romantic, but then a sailor yelled that one of the lifeboats got loose, was swinging, and destroyed the wheelhouse wall!

Lord Kingscourt was telling to his sister (Chapter XIII- in a letter) about his accomodations. We "are enjoying having 'rough it' a bit. We have four good enough rooms in a sectioned-off part of the upper deck slightly away from the other passengers... " (his sons have their own rooms)
"...with much egregious tussling about whose bathroom is the grander." They also eat breakfast in a stateroom and have another room for the nanny.

A lot better than was 3rd Class endured; they sleep in the hull of the ship with no partitions at all, were lucky to eat one meal a day, and the toilet facilities were vile.

The novel provides an excellent way to learn about the Famine and has a balenced view of the events. The writing is old-fashioned and sometimes flowery, but it has the flavor of the times.


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