BW31: The Man Booker Prize Long List for 2013

The long list for The Man Booker Prize for 2013 has just been announced this past week and there are some very interesting books on the list, some of which I've already added to my wishlist.  The Booker Prize foundation is a registered charity sponsored by The Man Group, an alternate investment management business.  The prize is awarded to the best full length novel written by an author who is a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published in the United Kingdom for the first time in the year of the prize. The story must be written in English and can not be self published.

The nominees are:

A Tale for the Time Being by  Ruth Ozeki

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw 

 

Harvest by Jim Crace

The Kills by Richard House 

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Luminaries by  Eleanor Catton 

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by  Eve Harris 

The Spinning Heart by  Donal Ryan 

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin 

TransAtlantic by Colum McCann 

Unexploded by Alison MacLeod 

We Need New Names by Noviolet Bulawayo

The shortlist will be announced September 10, 2013 and the winner on October 15, 2013 and the prize to the winner is £50,000.

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BW30: More book news!

I'm sure everyone has heard the news about J.K. Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling which was written under a pseudonym, Robert Galbraith.  I recently downloaded and will let you know what I think.   When Harry Potter first came out, I didn't give it a thought. But when I heard the hype about it and calls to ban the book, well of course I had to read it. And fell in love with the characters and the story. Same thing happened with Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.  Read it twice and loved it.   Rowling was a bit upset about the leak revealing she wrote the book.  I guess she hoped it stand on its own merits and sell not because of her name.  There are many authors who have written stories under different pseudonyms including Don Delillo who published under a book under a woman's name. Even Stephen King wrote a few novels under the name Richard Bachman back in the 70's and 80's. 

And for those of you who are armchair traveling around the world with me.  A Pack of Fun, one of the gals from Well Trained Mind, shared a link to A Year of Reading the World where a writer, Ann Morgan talks about a challenge she set for herself to read one book from every country in the world in one year.  Be sure to check out her list of books. You may just end up adding a few to your wishlists.

Speaking of wishlists and bucket lists - here's a few authors with birthdays this week to add.


July 21 - Ernest Hemingway / John Gardner
July 22 - Emma Lazarus / Mark McGarrity
July 23 - Raymond Chandler /  John Nichols
July 24 - Alexandre Dumas / Zelda Fitzgerald
July 25 - David Madison /  Robyn Carr
July 26 - George Bernard Shaw / Aldous Huxley

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BW29: Calvino Readalong

If not for Susan Wise Bauer's Well Educated Mind, I would have never heard of Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler.  It is another one of those intriguing, weirdly written books that I seem to gravitate to every few weeks.  According to Amazon:

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.  

It's a story within a story and begins with the narrator telling you how to to read the book.  The odd chapters are from a second person point of view with instructions or preparation for the next chapter and the even chapters are the story and in a variety of points of view. I'm going to be diving into the story within the next week or so.  Some of the ladies on the Well Trained Mind have decided to join me as well.


Books like these always remind me that reading is a visceral experience, a journey through a writer's creative mind and sometimes I just need to take the time to slow down, absorb, and enjoy the ride.  I was thumbing through the book and saw this sentence "An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page, of onion in fact, onion being fried" and immediately upon reading the word wafts smelled onions even before getting to the end of the line. Now I'm hungry.  *grin*

Come along and join me in reading If on a winter's night a traveler.

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BW28: Christy Awards

The Christy Awards, named in honor of Catherine Marshall's most famous novel Christy, are given for excellence in Christian fiction:

The Christy Award is designed to:

• Nurture and encourage creativity and quality in the writing and publishing of fiction written from a Christian worldview.
• Bring a new awareness of the breadth and depth of fiction choices available, helping to broaden the readership.
• Provide opportunity to recognize novelists whose work may not have reached bestseller status.

The 2013 Winners were just announced and they are:

Contemporary Romance:  The Breath of Dawn by Karen Heitzmann from her Spencer Family series.
Nominees included Lethal Legacy by Irene Hannon and Wildflowers from Winter by Katie Ganshert

Historical Romance: Against the Tide by Elizabeth Camden.
Nominees included Be Still My Soul by Joanne Bischof  and Love's Reckoning by Laura Frantz

 Contemporary Sequels, Series and Novellas:  You Don't Know Me by Susan May Warren
Nominees included Two Destinies by Elizabeth Musser and Waiting for Sunrise by Eva Marie Everson

Suspense:  Rare Earth by Davis Bunn.
Nominees included Downfall by Terri Blackstock, The Last Plea Bargain by Randy Singer and Submerged by Dani Pettrey

To see the rest of the categories, winners and finalists check out The Christy Awards website.  More books to add to your wishlists and mine.

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BW27: Eurorail through Europe

Can you believe we are halfway through the year?  Monday is July 1st and that means it's time to continue our travels across the continents.  If you've been doing the continental, I hope you had a grand time traipsing through Africa and are ready to take a ferry from Morocco over to Spain where we will begin our trip through Europe.  I'm going to splurge on a global Eurorail pass which will let me visit multiple countries and take a champagne tour through France, watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham palace, sleep in a historic castle in Ireland, explore the black forests of Germany, or perhaps hike up through the Swiss Alps.

Currently in my backpack is Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Midnight Palace, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler,  Frank Delaney's Ireland, and Matt Rees' Mozart's Last Aria.

Check out the link above Eurorail through Europe where I've highlighted a couple books from several countries to help get you started on your travels.   How about taking a literary tour of Europe.  Be sure to check out Adelante's program- Ireland's Nobel Literature or Literary Traveler's Le Belle Epoque in Paris.  Or take a tour of libraries starting with the world's largest library, The National Library of Spain  in Madrid, founded in 1712 by King Philip V.  Be sure to check out Flavorwire's stunning photo's of Europe's Most Beautiful Libraries.

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BW26: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Book #12 in Susan Wise Bauer's list of great fiction in Well Educated Mind is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.  Although it seemed like a soap opera at times, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel as much as I did War and Peace.   The story was originally published in serial form in The Russian Messenger from 1873 to 1877.  Tolstoy clashed with the editor with his political leanings in the last chapter and therefore became the final installment.  Anna Karenina is a complex story dealing with her adulterous affair with Count Vronsky and how it affects her life and relationships with those surrounding her.  

Chapter One: 

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was so sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky--Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world-- woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o'clock in the morning, not in his wife's bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
"Yes, yes, how was it now?" he thought, going over his dream. "Now, how was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables sang, Il mio tesoro--not Il mio tesoro though, but something better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and they were women, too," he remembered.

Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. "Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there's no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one's thoughts awake." And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife's room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his brows.

"Ah, ah, ah! Oo!..." he muttered, recalling everything that had happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and worst of all, his own fault.

"Yes, she won't forgive me, and she can't forgive me. And the most awful thing about it is that it's all my fault--all my fault, though I'm not to blame. That's the point of the whole situation," he reflected. "Oh, oh, oh!" he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.
Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.

She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details, and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of horror, despair, and indignation.

"What's this? this?" she asked, pointing to the letter.

And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he had met his wife's words.

There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful. He did not succeed in adapting his face to the position in which he was placed towards his wife by the discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt, denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining indifferent even--anything would have been better than what he did do--his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)--utterly involuntarily assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.
This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching sight of that smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the room. Since then she had refused to see her husband.

"It's that idiotic smile that's to blame for it all," thought Stepan Arkadyevitch.

"But what's to be done? What's to be done?" he said to himself in despair, and found no answer.

It can be read here, here, or download in ebook format from all sources including gutenberg, kindle or nook. 

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BW25: Ode to Fathers

me and my dad

        Life Lessons You may have thought I didn't see,
Or that I hadn't heard,
Life lessons that you taught to me,
But I got every word.   Perhaps you thought I missed it all,
And that we'd grow apart,
But Dad, I picked up everything,
It's written on my heart.   Without you, Dad, I wouldn't be
The person I am today;
You built a strong foundation
No one can take away.   I've grown up with your values,
And I'm very glad I did;
So here's to you, dear father,
From your forever grateful kid.   By Joanna Fuchs     Happy Fathers day to dads everywhere!
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BW24 - The Audies 2013

June is the month to celebrate audiobooks and recently stumbled across The Audies 2013 sponsored by the Audio Publishing Association.  Up until a couple years ago I wasn't really a big fan of audiobooks.  I'm very picky when it comes to narrators and even when found one I liked, would end up tuning out, because my brain was simply too busy.  Then I got a new car radio which was USB capable and had a brilliant idea.  Why not listen to a book I'd already read.  So I began downloading books to my Iphone and listening to J.D. Robb's In Death series and before I knew it, started enjoying my drives more and training my brain to listen to audio books.

Now I find myself listening while cleaning the house, gardening or  occasionally just sitting there doodling.  And I discovered it's a great sleep aid for a busy mind and curl up in bed most nights, listening until I start to phase out.   I'm still picky about the narrators and mainly like female narrators but find myself branching out and discovering some of the guys do a pretty good job without sounding like off Broadway female impersonators. 

Which brings me back to The Audies.  I'm looking forward to checking out a few of these award winning titles.

Audiobook of the Year:  The End of the Affair by Graham Greene and read by Colin Firth

Fiction:  The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and read by Claire Danes

AudioDrama:  Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner read by Ellen Kushner and a cast of others

Classic:   Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens read by Charlton Griffin

Distinguished Achievement on Production:  Dracula by Bram Stoker read by Tim Curry and a cast of others.

There are a few other categories listing the winners and nominees for each category.  Be sure to check it out and listen to an audio book or two this month.  Looks like they are all available at Audible.com

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BW23: Revisit old friends

It's June! How about that. Another year of homeschooling under our belt and 7th grade is done. I am more than ready to rest my brain.  I really haven't been in the mood to read anything new and have been revisiting old friends. Can't say they are necessarily comfort books.  Just those books that strike my fancy.  Surprisingly, even though I've read them before, it seems like the first time and I have the same anticipation of what's going to happen.  Some I remember what's going to happen and enjoy the build up. Others leave me thinking - "How could I have forgotten that?"    I'm currently rereading an oldie from 1980 Congo by Michael Crichton.  Which is now giving me to urge to reread Sphere.  And soon I'll be introducing my son to the book, Jurassic Park.  We watched the movie together and he loved it and asked to read the book, so it's on the way to us now from Barnes and Noble. 

Another author I love to revisit over and over again is Nora Roberts and her alter ego J.D. Robb.  I never get tired of her In Death series, which I've read twice and listened to in audio book once.  I love Eve and Roark and discover something new every time read the series.  So, yes, after perusing the shelves and  looking at Naked in Death yesterday, thought about about diving in again.  I recently downloaded the audiobook of Robert's first book in her key Trilogy, Key of Light and will invariably end up re-reading the book as well when don't have time to listen to the audiobook. 

I think June is going to be a month of rereading and following rabbit trails, seeing where those books lead me. 

What are your comfort books or books you like to revisit?

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BW22: Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

Book #11 in Susan Wise Bauer's list of great fiction in Well Educated Mind is Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.   The story was first published in 1866 in a literary journal, The Russian Messenger in 12 monthly installments.  It was later published in novel form.

Synopsis:  the story of Raskolnikov, an impoverished student tormented by his own thoughts after he brutally murders an old woman. Overwhelmed afterwards by guilt and terror, Raskolnikov confesses and goes to prison. There he realizes that happiness and redemption can only be achieved through suffering.

Chapter one:  

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.

This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears.
“I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,” he thought, with an odd smile. “Hm… yes, all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most…. But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking… of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything.”

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted food.

He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man’s heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked meeting at any time. And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge wagon dragged by a heavy dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: “Hey there, German hatter” bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him—the young man stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmerman’s, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him.

“I knew it,” he muttered in confusion, “I thought so! That’s the worst of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable…. It looks absurd and that makes it noticeable…. With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered…. What matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous as possible…. Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it’s just such trifles that always ruin everything….”

Continuing reading or listen to the rest of the story here or here.

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BW21: Literary Birthdays

Armchair traveling through the continents is and has been a fun and educational experience since I normally don't seek out literature from specific regions. Plus discussing books weekly with the gals on the Well Trained Mind forum has introduced me to authors I never considered reading before.  Which brings me to literary birthdays this week. We have an intriguing selection of authors to check out.

Today, May 19 is the anniversary of Lorraine Vivian Hansberry's birthday, best known for her 1959 play Raisin in the Sun, a play based on her family's experiences in chicago during the 1930's/40's.  A film version with the original cast including Sidney Poitier was released in 1961, a musical adaptation in 1973 and turned into a movie with Danny Glover in 1989.  Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer January 12, 1965.

May 20th  is the anniversary of French Novelist Honore de Balzac (1799 -1850)who wrote 80 novels and short stories collectively called  La Comédie humaine,(The Human Comedy).

May 21st is the anniversary of Italian author Dante Alighiere,(1265-1321) author of The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

May 22nd is the anniversary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), best known for his fictional series about Sherlock Holmes.

May 23rd is the anniversary of  Thomas Hood (1799-1845), English poet and playwright  and John Howard Payne, (1791 - 1852) American poet and author who is best remembered for his 1822 song "Home Sweet Home."

May 24th is the 85 birthday of irish novelist William Trevor, who won the Booker Prize in 2009 for his novel Love and Summer and knighted in 2002 for his services in literature.

May 25th is the anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), american poet and essayist.

Consider adding one or more of these authors to your reading wishlist. 

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BW20: Happy Mother's Day

Willow Tree - Mother and Son

Happy mother's day!  Since I became a mother, I've learned that a mother's love is unconditional (or should be)  When my son was little, we used to read Lisa McCourt's I Love You Stinky Face and it's one book I never could get rid of.  It's binding is taped together now because of how often we read it and to this day the sentiment in the story has stuck with us. Even though my son is now 13, he still ends the day with 'Mom, I love you no matter what.' 

More Than A Mother 

When God set the world in place,
when He hung the stars up in space,
when He made the land and the sea,
then He made you and me.

He sat back and saw all that was good,
He saw things to be as they should.
Just one more blessing He had in store;
He created a mother, but whatever for?

He knew a mother would have a special place
to shine His reflection on her child's face.
A mother will walk the extra mile
just to see her children smile.

She'll work her fingers to the bone
to make a house into a home.
A mother is there to teach and guide,
a mother will stay right by your side.

She'll be there through your pain and strife,
she'll stay constant in your life.
A mother will lend a helping hand
until you have the strength to stand.

She'll pick you up when you are down,
when you need a friend she'll stick around.
A mother is one who listens well,
will keep her word; will never tell.

A mother never pokes or pries
but stands quietly by your side,
giving you the strength you need,
encouraging you to succeed.

A mother is one who can be strong
when you need someone to lean on.
You're more than a mother to me;

a reflection of Him in your face I see,
a love that knows no boundaries.
I'm glad that you chose to be
all this and more to me.

You share a love that knows no end,
you're more than my mother,
you are my friend.

Kari Keshmiry

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