Review: Market Day

Market Day by James Sturm was a book I picked up on a whim while passing time at Borders, and I'm glad I did.  As I am still new to graphic novels, I had never heard of Sturm (though he seems to be a Big Deal in comics-land).  But I really liked the premise of this book, and it was a pretty slim volume, so I picked it up.

Market Day is about Mendleman, a Jewish rug weaver living in Eastern Europe right around the Industrial Revolution.  He is a dreamer who loves his art, but with a pregnant wife, he also feels a lot of pressure to provide for his family.  He sets off one morning to the town for market day, taking eight rugs with him to sell at one of the most respected shops in town.  However, when he arrives, his buyer no longer owns a shop, and the new shopkeeper refuses to buy his rugs.  This sets Mendleman into despair, and we follow as he tries to find another buyer for his rugs in town and then further afield.  As the day turns into night, Mendleman becomes more and more worried about his plight and how he will manage to balance his passion for high-quality workmanship with his need to provide for his family.

CSN Review Coming Soon

You may have seen the links around blogosphere recently for CSN Stores product reviews.  Here is me, jumping on that bandwagon!

When I first saw the reviews for CSN products probably about a year ago on blogosphere, I fell in love with their bookshelves.  The shelves that so many people received last year and reviewed were all so pretty and seemed like such a great way to display books.  But... really, I don't have room for bookshelves.  And then I considered getting a new bed.  But...really, I don't need a new bed.  For a very short moment, I considered exercise equipment.  But...really, I don't want exercise equipment.

What I do have room, need and desire for is a new set of cookware for when I move to Ann Arbor, MI in a few months and start cooking meals on a small stove.  So... stay tuned in some weeks for my review of a very pretty blue cookware set.  As some of you may know, I do love a good time in the kitchen, and so I'm quite excited to have a very pretty set of pots to take with me to school!

Nerds Heart YA Smackdown: Blessing's Bead & Wanting Mor

I am one of the lucky book bloggers that was given the opportunity to participate in the #nerdsheartya contest this year.  Nerds Heart YA is a fabulous idea!  As someone who really tries to use the book blogging forum to showcase lesser-known books through the use of the With Reverent Hands series and helping organize the Spotlight Series, I love the idea of an entire tournament centered on under-read middle grade and young adult books.  Especially as this year's tournament is centered on underrepresented populations in young adult books- the books must feature characters who are people of color, GLBT, disabled, economically marginalized or very religious.  How great is that?

I am a first-round judge in the tournament, so if you'd like to see how the brackets go down, follow the Nerds Heart YA blog and see if any of the books interest you!

The two books I read and reviewed for Nerds Heart YA are Blessing's Bead and Wanting Mor.  Below are brief thoughts on each book and my selection for the book that I think should move on to the next round.

DNF: The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno

Well, I suppose it had to happen some time!  The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno, by Ellen Bryson, is the first book this year that I was unable to finish.  It saddens me because it sounds so promising!  And in the Author's Note, she mentions Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which receives unanimous praise (or at least praise from Ana and Claire).  But this one just didn't work for me.

Bartholomew Fortuno is an act at PT Barnum's New York City museum; he is the world's skinniest man and believes he and the other museum acts have great gifts to share with the world.  One night, a mysterious new act arrives and Barnum seems obsessed with knowing all about her movements.  He enlists Fortuno to keep tabs on the new woman, and also run some tasks for him in Chinatown.  And... that's all I know as I stopped reading right around that time.

Double Mystery Review: Masquerade & The Beekeeper's Apprentice

Masquerade, by Walter Satterthwait, is the sequel to Escapade, which I read and really enjoyed last year.  Escapade was such a fun, light-hearted read and I was excited to read the sequel.  Masquerade is set in France as the Nazis become a power to contend with in Germany.  Phil Beamont and Jane Turner are separately deployed to 1920s Paris to investigate a murder-suicide of a famous society figure and his mistress.  Phil must contend with a flirtatious widow while Jane tries to dampen the interest of an affected teenager, and both must figure out whether the suicide really was suicide, in a Europe with an increasingly ominous political climate.

Review: The Red Wolf Conspiracy

The Red Wolf Conspiracy was the fantasy book that inspired me to finish a significant number of the outstanding series I had started so that I could get around to reading and enjoying this book.  The premise is complex.  The Chathrand is an ancient, massive warship, the last of its kind.  It is sent on a mission of peace from the Arquali empire to the Mzithrin, carrying on-board an ambassador, his mistress and his daughter, Thasha, who is promised in marriage to the Mzithrin ruler.  Also aboard is Pazel, a teenaged boy with a magical ability to understand every language he hears.  Sometimes.  The captain of the ship sees ghosts everywhere, there are 8-inch tall warriors stowing away and one rat who is shocked to realize that he has a mind of his own.  All these characters (and more!) come warily together on-board the Chathrand, unsure of who is friend and who is foe and what may really happen on a ship of such massive proportions and on such a difficult journey.

TSS: Is that book a Pamela or a Shamela?

Well, it has been a very long time since I have done a Sunday Salon post.  Mostly because I didn't have much to say, but also because I was out of the country.  But now I have an idea for a group of themed Sunday posts to share with you all for... as long as I can think of posts that go with the theme.  I shall start that next week, unless I forget to do so.  In which case, I shall start it on a different Sunday.

But back to today's post!

First, did you know that we have chosen another small press for the Spotlight Series?  We are highlighting Graywolf Press, which is a publisher in the great state of Minnesota!  Not only is it a fabulous small press that focuses on poetry and works in translation (among other more traditional book types), but it's also a non-profit publisher!  So if you participate in this series, you will be doing good twice over.  First by giving attention to a small business, and then by helping out a non-profit!  A win-win, isn't it?  So I highly recommend you mosey on over to the sign-up post by June 30th and get in on the action.  The series will take place between July 18 and 31.  Get pumped!

Now to the bulk of my post!  The other day on Twitter, I was discussing The Hunger Games, and then that led to discussion (however brief) of Twilight.  I said that if nothing else, Twilight did give a lot of people the opportunity to practice satire, and perhaps some of that satire will live on as classic literature in the future, the way that Shamela did for Pamela.

If you do not know the story of Pamela and Shamela, it is this.  Pamela (heavy-handedly subtitled Virtue Rewarded), written by Samuel Richardson in the 18th century, is an epistolary novel about a serving maid who must keep her innocence and her wits about her while her lecherous employer tries to seduce her.  This goes on for hundreds of pages of Pamela trying desperately to be chaste and virtuous while staying employed.  Pamela was a huge hit in England when it came out.  Everyone read it.  Including the famous Henry Fielding, who did not understand what all the fuss was about.

Fielding was so disturbed by the book's popularity that he promptly skewered it with satire, writing An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, (and then writing an even longer satire of it, Joseph Andrews), in which Shamela is not defending her virtue, but trying very hard to throw it away so that her master will marry her.  And her letters are written in hilariously colloquial language (virtue = "vartue").

And now it is Shamela and Joseph Andrews that are the classics, and no one reads Pamela, even though it was so popular when it came out.

Are there contemporary books that you can see in similar scenarios?  Is there a book that's so popular out there, and you just don't get it?  One that, were you a satirical genius like Henry Fielding, you would skewer with your mighty pen?  What would it be?

PS- Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!

Review: Tiger Moon

Tiger Moon, by Antonia Michaelis (translated by Anthea Bell), was recommended to me (I don't know remember by whom) as a good example of fantasy fiction set in India.  I quickly snagged it from Amazon and thought it would be a perfect book to take with me on my trip to India.  I read it there and really enjoyed it, though my cover has a very light-skinned girl on it.  I am not going to call that "white-washing," however, as Indians themselves are so obsessed with having light skin that for a girl to qualify as "beautiful" basically means she has to be albino, and as the girl in the book is supposedly gorgeous, no doubt she had very fair skin.

But I digress.

Tiger Moon is an Arabian Nights-esque fairy tale.  A young woman, Safia, is stolen from her home by a besotted man who spirits her away to join his harem.  She dreads her wedding night as she knows she will be killed after it; she is not a virgin.  Luckily for her, her husband takes ill and she has just a few days to plan her escape.

She begins weaving a story for the court eunuch, Lalit, about another young woman, a daughter of the god Krishna, who was captured by the demon Ravana (of Ramayana fame).  Krishna and the other Hindu gods have lost power over the years and so Krishna cannot save his daughter himself- he must enlist the help of a human.  He decides on a thief, Farhad Kamal, and gifts him with a white tiger to speed his journey.  As Raka tells her story over three nights, fact and fiction begin to merge and readers end the story with a strong sense of the power of story-telling.

With Reverent Hands: Keeping Her in the Light

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 feature, please comment here with your email address or email me and I will send you a template!

This week's post is by a blog follower I didn't even know I had until he emailed me asking for the With Reverent Hands template!  It was so exciting to hear from someone I never knew before and so I thank him for making my day so great with his email!  Unfortunately, I don't have much information about him to share with you, so I shall just say thank you, Jomel, for participating and let him share his book with you.  It's the shortest book spotlighted so far!

NOTE:  Jomel is related to the author of the book he is choosing to spotlight below.


What book are you highlighting?   
Keeping Her in the Light, by Nicole Fuentes

Review: Bachelor Girl

Bachelor Girl:  100 Years of Breaking the Rules - A Social History of Living Single was one of my rare impulse buys.  I saw the title and snatched it up immediately and gloried in the anticipation of reading a book celebrating single women in the 20th century.  However, that wasn't exactly what I got.

Betsy Israel starts her book by describing her own single life before she married in the 1980s.  She then goes back through history, starting with the American Victorian era and continuing through the early 2000s to describe what life as an American single woman was like.  But this book ended up disappointing me in almost every way.

First, Israel focuses almost solely on women in New York City.  She hardly ventures outside the city at all (she does chat about Boston for a bit), and to me that really smacked of the "New York City is the center of the universe and no one who doesn't live here matters" mentality.  I wish she had gotten out of the city a bit more as I am sure women who lived singly in rural areas faced a very different situation than those in New York.

Also, Israel's references were not what I hoped.  She used secondary sources for the most part, looking at newspaper articles.  She also appears to have watched every movie about women ever made and her conclusions drawn from this research were, to me, fairly sketchy.  I really hoped to get more first-person accounts of what it was like to be living single, and she had very few of those.  So really, her book wasn't so much about what it was like to be single as it was about media perceptions of single women.  I also was very disappointed by Israel's take on modern single women.

One thing that I found interesting and that bowled me over somewhat was how dangerous single women were made out to be in the past.  As though an unmarried woman threatened the very make-up of society and might lead to apocalypse.  This is something that comes up again and again in countless cultures and eras and it is so disturbing to me.  Really, the treatment of women throughout history disturbs me as people are always trying to classify us or put us into some box.  It doesn't seem like people have that same compulsion for men.  There is no need to "define" a man by his role, but there seems always to be a need to do that to women.  Single women are made to seem unnatural and hateful and horrible, and I ached for the women in this book who were made to feel so alone because they didn't go the traditional route.

I also found interesting that the feminists of the 20s and 30s were very disappointed with their daughters of the 40s and 50s for not doing more to advance women's rights.  From what it seemed like in the book, women of the 1940s felt that the generation before had achieved a lot, but also sacrificed too much for the attainment of it.  I think this is very similar to the way women who came of age in the 60s and 70s view the current generation, thinking that we aren't doing enough to advance our cause.

Overall, though, this book fell very flat for me and I am disappointed it didn't convert on what I think is a fascinating subject matter.  I think I'll just have to go for primary sources from each historical period for a more accurate representation of the feminist movement.

Review: Ladies of the Grand Tour

Ladies of the Grand Tour:  British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment & Adventure in 18th Century Europe was a complete impulse buy for me some years ago.  I pretty much buy any non-fiction book I find about Georgian or Regency England, and this one sounded so completely up my alley!  Georgian era?  Check.  Women?  Check.  Travel?  Check.  And there went my check to pay for the book.

Dolan's book is separated into nine chapters, most of which detail why upper-class Englishwomen went to the Continent during the 18th century.  Some went for the reasons we go now- to see the sights, to absorb a different culture, to learn more about the world around them.  But a very large number also went abroad to escape unhappy marriages or scandals at home.

Review: The Bucolic Plague

The Bucolic Plague:  How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers is a somewhat misleading title.  Yes, it's about a gay couple in New York that buys a rural mansion, but it's not so much about the farming as it is about relationships and the pursuit of perfection.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell is a former drug addicted drag queen (he brings this up multiple times in the narrative, though I am not sure how it was particularly relevant) turned ad executive.  His partner, Brent, is an MD/MBA who works for Martha Stewart.  On their way home from apple picking, they come across the beautiful Beekman mansion in Sharon Springs, NY and impulsively purchase it.  Then they hire a caretaker to raise his goats there.  They plant a large vegetable garden, have guests over and set about living the dream- city living during the week and relaxing on a farm on the weekends.  Perfect!  Josh soon wants to quit his job and live full-time on the farm, and they set about making this dream a reality.  Except, they soon come to find, making dreams reality takes a lot of work and can be exhausting, and as the economy collapses around them, Josh wonders if it's a worthwhile endeavor.

With Reverent Hands: The Unfortunates

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 Stu who posts at Winston's Dad's Blog.  I only met Stu recently, through Eva at A Striped Armchair, and we have started chatting and visiting each other's blogs in the past few months.  I really like Stu's heavily international focus in his reading.  I think translated literature can be very intimidating so following the blog of someone who reads so much of it makes me much more likely to tackle it!  I highly recommend Stu's blog, and I hope you enjoy his post below about a truly unique book!

If you would like to participate in this guest post feature here on BookLust, please email me and I will send you the template!

What book are you highlighting? 

The Unfortunates, by BS Johnson 

Review: Fire

Fire is the prequel (but totally stand-alone story) to Kristin Cashore's Graceling.  It centers on Fire, who is a monster where she is from.  She is absolutely beautiful, has spectacularly red hair and has the power to make people want her, even against their will, and to use that power for her purposes.  Her father was also a monster, and used his power for such terrible reasons that the kingdom of the Dells is on the verge of civil war.  Fire does not wish to abuse her powers, so she tries to hide her beauty and stay away from others.  But when the king comes asking her for help to save their country, she must decide whether to use her power for good.

Review: The Emerald Storm

The Emerald Storm is the fourth book in The Riyria Revelations.  (See my reviews of books one, two and three.)  As you get further along in a fantasy series, it becomes impossible to write a plot summary that doesn't give away some sort of spoiler, so I'll just say...

Royce and Hadrian go off on another quest together.  Princess Arista embarks on her own, separate quest.  The Empress becomes lucid.  The plot thickens.

There we are!  No spoilers!

I must admit I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as the three that came before it.  There was a lot going on and I didn't find much of it interesting.  I had a feeling that would be the case because much of this book took place on a ship.

Review: Burma Chronicles

B

Guy Delisle's Burma Chronicles is a fantastic travelogue and political commentary memoir told in graphic novel form.  As an added bonus, it makes what must have been a very difficult and tense time seem humorous and fun.

Burma Chronicles details the year that Delisle, his wife (a physician working for Doctors Without Borders) and their baby Louis spent in Burma.  Burma is ruled by a totalitarian regime, and Delisle's humorous anecdotes about cultural differences are set side-by-side with commentary about the ways by which the regime oppresses the Burmese people.  Delisle lives in relative safety with the expats, but gets to know some locals well enough to realize that life can be a harrowing experience for the Burmese.
I am not sure if Delisle is the only person who does graphi
c travelogues.  He is the only person I know of, though that doesn't really mean much.  I would say, though, with my limited experience, that Delisle has a great idea, and does very well with it.  Why aren't more travelogues told in graphic novel format?  It's genius!

Review: Excellent Women

Oh, Barbara Pym, how you toyed with me.  Here I was, thinking that your books were cozy reads with light humor and English country hi jinks in all the faded glory of empire after Word War II.  Boy, was I wrong!  Excellent Women does have light humor, but it is certainly not what I would call a cozy read.  (Others do, though, so maybe it's just me.)

Excellent Women centers around Mildred Lathbury, a 30-something clergyman's daughter who lives on her own in a somewhat downtrodden area of London that was hit by the Blitz.  She is very involved in her church; most people think she wants to marry the vicar, but she does not.  At the start of the story, a new couple has moved in below Mildred.  The Napiers married during the height of the war and now that things have settled down, they realize that they do not really have much in common.  Mrs. Napier is an anthropologist and spends much of her time with another man, Mr. Everard Bone.  Mr. Napier is charming, but Mildred can't help but feel that he isn't very dependable.  And then there is the vicar and his sister, and their new suspiciously beautiful apartment renter.  And Mildred's childhood friend, of course.  In fact, there are so very many people in Mildred's life, all of whom expect her to make them priorities, that she has very little time to make herself a priority.  After all, she is a single woman.  What can she have to do with her time?

Review: Bone (the complete series)

Bone is a graphic novel series (9 books in all) by Jeff Smith.  It is epic in scope, but I don't think you get a sense of just how epic until about halfway through the series.  Therefore, I'm glad I grabbed the one-volume epic when I saw it, because to be honest, if I had these books separately, I don't think I would have had much motivation to continue past the second book.  Luckily for me, though, I had all nine stories handily in one volume, so finishing the series was not difficult for me! 

The story centers on three cousins- Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley- who were kicked out of their hometown, Boneville.  They come to a valley that is both beautiful and fraught with danger.  Strange rat-creatures try to capture them, seeming particularly interested in Phoney.  Fone befriends a young lady named Thorn who lives on a farm with her Grandma Ben.  But there is unease in the valley- rumors of sleeping dragons, a large tiger and locusts abound, in addition to the rat-creatures. 

And, of course, there is Moby Dick.