Double Review: Magic Study and Fire Study

 I read Magic Study and Fire Study consecutively, and as they are two books in the same trilogy (following Poison Study, which I reviewed here), I thought I'd just review them together.  And as they are sequels in a fantasy trilogy, it will be quite difficult to do plot summaries, so I'll just do a general one for both.

At the end of Poison Study, Yelena leaves Ixia to go south to Sitia to learn more about her inner abilities.  She meets many people along the way and within the city- some take to her instantly, but others view her with grave distrust.  She is a foreigner and relations between Ixia and its neighbors are strained.  As Yelena learns about her own abilities, she becomes frightened of her own powers, particularly when other people associate her with the evil that seems to be infiltrating the world.  She must fight back against the corruption and learn to understand her own powers and feelings before she can help those around her battle the dark forces that seem to surround them.

With Reverent Hands: The Blue Castle

I bring you with reverent hands / the books of my numberless dreams.

-WB Yeats, "A Poet To His Beloved"

WB Yeats, I'm sure, gave books to his beloved that he valued highly himself, and that he handled with reverence.  If you had to recommend a book you revered to someone, what would it be?
 
I'm asking you to highlight one book.  One book that you adore, that you prize, that changed your life, that you would save from a burning building, that you found serendipitously on a library shelf or at a used bookstore, looking lonely and ignored.  A book that thrills you but that, you have come to realize, no one else has really ever heard of, much less read.  With Reverent Hands is all about those books- the ones that deserve a wider audience than they are given and that you want everyone to go out and read, even if they are out of print.

This is a guest post series, not a meme!  If you would like to participate, please email me and I will send you a template for you to do a guest post.  Thank you!

This week's post is by Rachel, who blogs at A Fair Substitute for Heaven, one of the first blogs I ever started following!   She's been blogging since 2006, so if you have yet to find her, you're just not looking hard enough!  Rachel is a proud Canadian (which shows in her selection below) and it shows in her blog.  I also adore her because she loves Anne of Green Gables, hates Nicholas Sparks and watches whatever the Canadian equivalent of Masterpiece Theatre is.  A woman after my own heart!

What book are you highlighting?  

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery 

Review: The Arrival

It is fitting that I can think of no words to adequately describe The Arrival because the book has no words.  It is told entirely in beautiful drawings by Shaun Tan that are reminiscent of the silent film era.  The Arrival tells the story of a man who leaves his home to make a new life for himself and his family on a distant shore.  He arrives in the foreign country with no knowledge of the language, the culture, or the people.  His loneliness is tangible, until he slowly makes friends and assimilates and learns that his new home holds friends and stories and enchantments, just as his old home did.

I loved this story.  I have begun to enjoy graphic novels more recently, but none of them made so clear to me until this one just how much depth and emotion can be conveyed through drawings.  It seems silly, really.  I enjoy visual art and paintings and think that they can convey great feeling.  And I didn't doubt that graphic novels could.  After all, I adored Blankets.  But the drawings in this book are much more traditional and perhaps because they weren't sketches or only in black and white, they made a greater impression on me.  I was enthralled by the pictures in this book as I don't think I have been since I was a child.

Off once more!

One of my favorite cousins from Detroit is getting married next weekend in India, and so I am off Thursday to attend the wedding.  It will be a short trip (as I was just in India in September)- I'll be back June 8th- and I have loads of scheduled posts for you all so you won't miss me while I'm gone, but please don't hate me for not responding to comments or commenting on your posts!

I would love it if you would email me any posts you think I'd find of interest.  I will be coming home and "marking all as read" for the period that I was away.

You all behave yourselves!

Review: A Man Lay Dead

The Classics Circuit is back!  This time, it's the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and I used the opportunity to dust off a copy of A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh that was given to me three years ago by one of my closest friends who lives in Australia.  Talk about taking a long time to get around to reading a book!

A Man Lay Dead is the first book in the Inspector Alleyn series.  It was written in 1934, and from what I can gather, it is a book contemporary to the period.  I can't be sure because oddly, WWI was not mentioned even once, even in passing.  Often, I find that you can't read much that takes place during the 1930s without at least brushing on the subject of the Great War.  This book managed to do so; however, there was certainly commentary about Russia and a Russian character with a fairly bizarre accent, and that seems true to the period.

Anyway, onto the story!  Sir Hubert Handesley is famous for his country house parties, at which he provides fabulous cocktails and arranges parlor games for his guests.  This time, the game is (surprise!) Murder.  The light-hearted fun takes a turn for the macabre when one of the guests is found dead in the hall, killed by his own knife.  Everyone becomes a suspect and Inspector Alleyn of the Scotland Yard is called in to investigate the possible involvement of a Russian secret society.  He also gets to meet and befriend some of the house guests, two of whom find the detective life quite exciting.

Review: Skim

Skim, by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, has won a plethora of awards for graphic novels, for young adult books, for illustrations, etc.  So when I had some time in Borders the other day, I grabbed it (and Burma Chronicles, which I only read half of but really enjoyed and is now coming to me via ILL).  And I finished it in one sitting!

Skim is a tenth grader at a Catholic high school in Canada.  She is a half-Asian who is dealing with divorced parents, trying to be a Wiccan, falling in love with her female English teacher, isolating herself from a best friend and recovering from a broken arm.  One day at school, she learns that a very popular girl's boyfriend committed suicide, and rumors fly that he did so because he was gay.  The school population reacts by forming a Girls Celebrating Life club, but that only makes Skim and others feel even more isolated.

With Reverent Hands: The Only Boy For Me

I bring you with reverent hands / the books of my numberless dreams.

-WB Yeats, "A Poet To His Beloved"

WB Yeats, I'm sure, gave books to his beloved that he valued highly himself, and that he handled with reverence.  If you had to recommend a book you revered to someone, what would it be?
 
I'm asking you to highlight one book.  One book that you adore, that you prize, that changed your life, that you would save from a burning building, that you found serendipitously on a library shelf or at a used bookstore, looking lonely and ignored.  A book that thrills you but that, you have come to realize, no one else has really ever heard of, much less read.  With Reverent Hands is all about those books- the ones that deserve a wider audience than they are given and that you want everyone to go out and read, even if they are out of print.

If you would like to participate in the With Reverent Hands series of guest posts on this blog, please contact me and I'll send you the template!

This week's guest post is by one of my favorite bloggers!  Strangely, I only learned her real name when she emailed me her submission.  Zee writes at the fabulous Notes from the North, reviewing books in a cold climate for the betterment of us all.  She is a huge fan of Anne Shirley.  I also really like how she will review non-English books on her blog.  I always wish more international, dual language bloggers would do this because it gives me a sense of more of the  cultural nuances present in different areas.  Also, it makes me more likely to seek out translated books.  So I'm sure you can see why I am into the Zee, and I hope you check her out!

What book are you highlighting? 

The Only Boy for Me by Gil McNeil

Review: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I must admit that sometimes when I read, I feel very intelligent.  Sometimes this is because of what I am reading.  For example, when I read and enjoyed Dead Souls, I was pretty impressed with myself.  Have you ever felt that way about a book?  That it raised your library cred just a little bit?

I admit that part of the reason Memoirs of an Anti-Semite appealed to me was because I thought it would raise my library cred and make me seem erudite and worldly and classy.  It  has all the criteria I look for in a "brainy book."  An interesting title.  An original premise.  An eloquent voice.  Memorable characters.  Symbolism.  It is definitely a library cred book.  And, had I understood any of it, I would feel really smart right now.

Have you ever read a book and felt wildly, completely lost?  The kind of lost where you are frantically reading, hoping comprehension will dawn, but it does not?  That is how this book felt for me.  I must admit that I am not as intelligent a reader as I sometimes like to believe.

Review: An African in Greenland

Yay, it's Spotlight Small Press Week!!  I'm very excited to help put the spotlight on another great small press publisher this week, and I hope by May 22nd, you can all immediately recognize the very distinctive covers that New York Review Books Classics has.

As I already told you why NYRB Classics is absolutely amazing in my post yesterday, I shall get straight to my review today.  I chose to review two books for this Spotlight Series, and the first one is An African in Greenland.  Sometimes, when browsing books online or in a store, I come across one with a very catchy title and must immediately take it down from the shelf (or click through, if it's the internet) and learn what it's about.  That was exactly the case with An African in Greenland (and the other book I chose to review).  What an intriguing title!

And it was definitely an intriguing book as well.  An African in Greenland follows Tete-Michel Kpomassie on his journey from Togo to Greenland in the 1950s, and then from the southern part of Greenland to the northern part.  Kpomassie was 16 when he came across a book on Greenland and decided that he must travel there.  He set off with remarkable speed on this journey, spending eight years trying to get from Togo, through northern Africa and Europe and then ending up in Greenland.  There, he spent a year living with the Inuits, learning their culture, and thoroughly enjoying himself.

TSS: NYRB Classics!

Today is the first day of the Spotlight on New York Review Books Classics!  I am very excited for this week's Spotlight Series because NYRB is my favorite publisher.  I am so thrilled that over 40 book bloggers signed up to participate in the series this week.  Hopefully by Saturday, May 22nd, you will all instantly recognize the very distinctive cover of an NYRB Classic book.

As many of you already know if you have been reading this blog for some time now, I read and loved Stephen Benatar's Wish Her Safe at Home.  This is the first book I read by NYRB Classics, and the cover, introduction and story all made me want to learn more about the publisher.  When I visited the publisher's website and browsed the catalog, I realized that the books chosen for publication were wonderfully diverse- by subject matter, author ethnicity, time period written and any other criteria I would use to judge a publisher.  They publish everything from Dante's Inferno to Viking battles to stories of Nazi occupation to criminology to treatises on growing food organically.  So many books in the NYRB catalog pique my interest that now, if I see one on a bookshelf somewhere, I automatically pick it up as I am sure to find it interesting in some way.

Small press publishers such as Persephone, Hesperus Press and NYRB Classics make a concerted effort to bring forgotten books back into publication for the betterment of readers everywhere.  I am so glad that they give us the opportunity to read books that otherwise, we might never have known.  I hope that some of this week's Spotlight Series posts inspire you to pick up one of NYRB's distinctive covers the next time you see one.  Having picked up several myself, I can say that they are definitely worth the shelf space!

Review: Shortcomings

My goodness, could any cover more properly describe my reactions to a book than this one?!  Ah, Shortcomings.  Two people separated (via pretty flower-like snowflakes) by the same culture. Both people look quite angsty and depressed.  They used to be close, but alas, they have found themselves on opposite sides of a snow drift.

Adrian Tomine's graphic novel is about Ben, a sarcastic and vastly unhappy movie theater manager in Berkeley who is tired of the Asian scene.  He doesn't like discussing race or racism or being Asian.  His girlfriend Miko, on the other hand, fully embraces her Asian culture and is proud of who she is.  She worries, though, that all Ben really wants is a white girl.  Ben's best friend Alice wants any girl.  Yup, she's an Asian PhD candidate who has an eye for a pretty younger girl and seems to have wreaked havoc amongst the lesbian population of her school.  When Miko tells Ben she wants a break and goes to New York to pursue an internship, their relationship is tested to its limits.

With Reverent Hands: The Fishermen

I bring you with reverent hands / the books of my numberless dreams.

-WB Yeats, "A Poet To His Beloved"

WB Yeats, I'm sure, gave books to his beloved that he valued highly himself, and that he handled with reverence.  If you had to recommend a book you revered to someone, what would it be?
 
I'm asking you to highlight one book.  One book that you adore, that you prize, that changed your life, that you would save from a burning building, that you found serendipitously on a library shelf or at a used bookstore, looking lonely and ignored.  A book that thrills you but that, you have come to realize, no one else has really ever heard of, much less read.  With Reverent Hands is all about those books- the ones that deserve a wider audience than they are given and that you want everyone to go out and read, even if they are out of print.

If you would like to participate in this series, please let me know!  I will email you the template if you leave me your email address.  

This week's post is by Louise, who blogs at Lou's Pages.  I distinctly remember clicking through to Louise's blog after a comment she made on someone else's blog (of course, I don't remember whose), and since then I have really enjoyed reading her reviews.  For someone whose first language isn't English, she does really well writing eloquent and easy-to-read reviews (in English).  I'm excited that she's posting here with the first foreign language offering from With Reverent Hands!  But don't worry- it was translated into English, too!

What book are you highlighting? 
 The Fishermen by Hans Kirk

Review: The Working Poor

I read David Shipler's The Working Poor for a book discussion group I helped lead about economic oppression and its impact on quality of life.  The book tells the stories of numerous working-class people and their families, detailing the struggle to make ends meet and how easy it is to slide down a very slippery slope.  It also touches on how government assistance helps, but not enough, and how many companies take advantage of the poor, charging them huge fees they cannot afford.

I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed some years ago and it really rubbed me the wrong way.  I found Ehrenreich abrasive, confrontational and not in the least easy to sympathize with.  I much preferred Shipler's book.  He lets people tell their own stories.  He doesn't embellish, but provides context for very disturbing and startling statistics.

Review: The Sparrow

I read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow with my good friend Sudha for our long-distance book club.  The book was a fabulous selection as there is so much going on, and there is so much in it to discuss!

In The Sparrow, a scientist checking radio waves across the universe comes across a clip of music which he determines is from another planet.  Within weeks, the Jesuits have found a way to send him, a few priests, and an assortment of other friends out to the planet Rakhat.  But all there does not go well, and as the story unfolds in a series of flashbacks, we realize just how complicated the mission to Rakhat was.

And that is all I'm going to say because this is a book you should discover for yourself!  It's fantastic and there is so much going on I don't know how you could read it and not continue to think about it for weeks afterward.

And now, my discussion with Sudha about this book.  I'm in green and Sudha is in blue.  Apologies- it's quite long, but I don't think there are any major spoilers.

TSS: And they did NOT live happily ever after

A traditional happy ending is one in which the main character ends in a happy frame of mind.  This is often associated with fairy tales and romance novels.  YA books used to end happily most of the time, though not so much any more.  Many of the old school Disney cartoons involving princesses being saved from evil women by stiff and not very exciting princes end with the phrase, "And they lived happily ever after."  And so we are made to believe it, to feel that they must be happy because the story says so.

But what if you don't believe it?  Then is it really that happy an ending?

Cookbook Reviewitas

Some of you may know that one of my favorite pastimes besides reading is cooking.  I have gotten a few cookbooks over the past several weeks, and I've been testing them by using one or two recipes from each.  Which brings me to a dilemma- when you review a cookbook, how many recipes must you try before you can write a good review?  Do you have to try any?  Or all?  I usually try a couple and then base most of my review on the set-up of the book- the ease with which I can find important information.  So... hopefully that works for you, too!  These are pretty short reviews, so I'm calling them reviewitas.

As a huge fan of the local farmers' market, I was so excited to get Fast, Fresh & Green!  Unfortunately, as most vegetables aren't in season right now, I haven't been able to do much with this book quite yet.  However, I am all set to use it through this summer and fall!  In flipping through this book, I feel like it's well set-up.  Almost all the dishes in here are sides.  At least, I think they are as the book is not set up with "Appetizers/Mains/Sides" etc., the way that many traditional books are set up.  Rather, it's set up by the way you cook the vegetables (sauteeing, braising, stir frying, etc).  I like this book for emotional reasons.  So many people are anti-vegetable.  As I grew up in a household that was vegetarian probably 70% of the week, I find this fact very difficult to stomach (pun intended).  And I can't help but think that people are anti-vegetable because they don't know how to cook them properly.  So... here is a book that makes it so simple and has a lot of fantastic ideas on how to make vegetables a major part of your diet and enjoy them, too!  There's way more to do than just steam them, I assure you.

I received a copy of Creating Empty Bottle Moments to review, and it's very different than I expected.  Not in a bad way at all.  There aren't that many recipes in this book.  Rather, Clive Berkman shares with readers some "empty bottle moments"- occasions he participated in with friends and family and others and how special they were.  And then he shares with us the recipes he used for those occasions.  As there aren't too many recipes in here, I certainly wouldn't use this as your go-to cookbook, if you were to only purchase one.  But it's a nice coffee table book and I used his very simple phyllo brie recipe and it was a hit!  The only thing I disliked somewhat about this book was the index.  It was indexed by course, so I couldn't look up an ingredient (i.e., "chicken") and find all recipes relating to that ingredient, which I found annoying.

This last book, Wine Cocktails, I haven't made any recipes from mostly because I am lazy, mixology-wise.  But I love the idea of this book.  I think wine intimidates many people, and so I like that this book gives you inventive and creative ways of including wine in a cocktail party.  I am a huge fan of wine, though I never really analyze it in any way.  I just like to have wine with friends, often over a meal.  I love drinking wine outdoors in the summer.  I like the culture that surrounds wine.  I just think it's fun, and I'm thrilled that now I have a book that will let me experiment more with it.

Review: Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog)

Thank you, thank you, thank you Ana for your review of Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the dog), by Jerome K. Jerome!  I would say something dramatic like, "I haven't read something this funny in forever!" but that would be wrong because I read The Wee Free Men just a short time ago and that book had me cracking up all over the place, too.

I have no idea what the plot summary of this book is.  Ostensibly, three (absolutely marvelous) friends living in London decide to take a boat trip up the Thames, with a dog named Montmormency.  The book is a recounting of their travel experience.  I remember my English teacher in high school telling me that The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was one of the best examples of stream-of-consciousness narratives in the English language, but I would say that Jerome trumps Joyce because his stream-of-conscious conversational narrative is absolutely hilarious and witty and amazing.

With Reverent Hands: The Power of One

I bring you with reverent hands / the books of my numberless dreams.

-WB Yeats, "A Poet To His Beloved"

WB Yeats, I'm sure, gave books to his beloved that he valued highly himself, and that he handled with reverence.  If you had to recommend a book you revered to someone, what would it be?
 
I'm asking you to highlight one book.  One book that you adore, that you prize, that changed your life, that you would save from a burning building, that you found serendipitously on a library shelf or at a used bookstore, looking lonely and ignored.  A book that thrills you but that, you have come to realize, no one else has really ever heard of, much less read.  With Reverent Hands is all about those books- the ones that deserve a wider audience than they are given and that you want everyone to go out and read, even if they are out of print.

This week's post is by Greg, who blogs on The New Dork Review of Books (great blog title, isn't it?!).  I have never met him, which is unfortunate as we volunteer at the same organization, Open Books!  I am hoping to meet him in person soon, but until then I am quite happy getting to know him through his blog, where he reviews quality books and has just recently discovered The Shadow of the Wind, a book blogosphere favorite.  And while he doesn't like the movie version of the book he highlights below, I remember loving it when we watched it in school, and now feel like I should read the book as soon as possible!  I have a feeling he'll have that same effect on you :-)

What book are you highlighting?

I am highlighting The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay.

When did you first read it?

I first read it in the fall of 2004, based on recommendations from several family members who’d been passing the book around. Frankly, it didn't sound interesting to me (I’m not a huge boxing guy and wasn’t that interested in South African history), but they kept insisting, so I started reading. Instantly. Hooked. It’s one of the few books that caused me to set my alarm for a few hours before I’d normally get up to go to work, so I could read.   

Review: All Quiet on the Western Front

We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a book that had a profound effect on me when I was younger.  I read it in high school and I remember it was the first book that made clear to me that wars often do not have a "good side" and a "bad side."  There are no sides, really.  There are just people, who in any other situation, might get along quite well and be friends, but because of some decision they did not make, they are instead on opposite sides of a field trying to kill each other.  It may seem naive or silly that I was well into my teens before I truly understood that, but it's true.  Perhaps it's also because I knew WWII much better than WWI that I had a vague sense that Germany was at fault for everything.  Remarque's book made it clear to me that was not the case.

TSS - Review: Team of Rivals

I started reading Team of Rivals in December.  I thought it would be a great way to end 2009- reading a big doorstopper of a book all about my favorite president.  Almost four months to the day later, I finally finished it!  Whew!

That's not to say that Team of Rivals is not an excellent book.  It is.  But it is massive and dense and full of lion-like characters who dominate the page.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, but I am glad I gave myself the leisure to read it whenever I felt like it, instead of all at once.

I am not going to do a summary here because I think it would be somewhat fruitless.  The book is about Abraham Lincoln's ascendancy to the Presidency (I just made that phrase up, and it has quite a ring to it, doesn't it?) and what he did when he got there.  How did he deal with his Cabinet?  How did he manage to abolish slavery?  What was his personality?  Did people have confidence in him?