September 26-October 3 is Banned Books Week in the United States. I don’t imagine I need to preach to those of us who are book bloggers; our delight, our passion, our mental and spiritual growth, and our sense of connection to the world and those around us can often be found in the very books [...]
Archive for September, 2009
Banned and Challenged Classics
Posted in Uncategorized on September 30, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Poe’s Children
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 29, 2009 | 12 Comments »
If you bought a bag of apples, and only a third of them were worth eating, would you complain to the store? If you bought a lawn mower, and it only cut the grass a third of the time (or worse, a third of your blades of grass), would you return it?
Poe’s Children, a collection [...]
Vanilla Beans and Brodo
Posted in Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on September 29, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Good food. Beautiful scenery. Dreadful writing. That’s Vanilla Beans and Brodo: Real Life in the Hills of Tuscany in a nutshell. In this book, Isabella Dusi, an Australian expat, takes us through a year in Montalcino, the Tuscan town where, at the time of writing, she had lived with her husband for five years.
By writing [...]
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on September 28, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Savannah, Georgia, a small southern city known for its history and its hospitality, is both the setting and the subject for John Berendt’s 1994 book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. When this book was first released, it was a word-of-mouth sensation. Everyone I knew seemed to be reading it, but I let the [...]
Sunday Salon: A Book Geek’s Weekend
Posted in Sunday Salon on September 27, 2009 | 19 Comments »
I don’t often use this space to write about my life activities, but I’m making an exception today because my weekend was filled with activities that I think Shelf Love readers would find interesting. It was truly a literature geek’s weekend.
The fun started on Friday night. Some of you may know that I’m a big [...]
Home Cooking
Posted in Contemporary, Food, Nonfiction on September 25, 2009 | 4 Comments »
As you can see from my reviews of Passion and Affect and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, Laurie Colwin is one of my favorite contemporary authors. For me, her writing is exactly right, like having precisely what you want to eat when you’re hungry: tart lemonade on a hot day, or a soup with [...]
The Little Stranger
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 24, 2009 | 15 Comments »
The BBAW — and a recent vacation together, during which we did little but talk about books — reminded Teresa and me how much we enjoy the collaborative nature of this blog. We decided, therefore, to do a joint review of Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, which has been shortlisted for the Booker prize and [...]
The Tender Bar
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on September 23, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I read J.R. Moehringer’s memoir The Tender Bar for my book club. We usually read mysteries, but in this case the owner of the restaurant where we meet offered to buy our dinners if we read this book and discussed it with him. We weren’t about to turn that down!
JR was the only son of a [...]
Sunday Salon: Why I Read
Posted in Sunday Salon on September 20, 2009 | 18 Comments »
Several months ago, I was sitting quietly in my office’s lunchroom reading, my usual lunchtime activity. On this particular day, three or four others were sitting at their own tables, also reading. As it happens, all of us were editors. (I work at an education association with a large publishing department.) A co-worker, who organizes [...]
Infinite Jest
Posted in Contemporary, Speculative Fiction on September 17, 2009 | 16 Comments »
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling postmodern 1,079-page tome, was the center of a summer-long project called Infinite Summer. I had been curious about this book for years, and this opportunity to read and discuss it with others motivated me to finally give it a try. It’s difficult to sum up such a complex book [...]
