Books!
One of my Christmas presents this year was an amazon.com gift certificate, always useful. (Thanks, Chris!) The only problem is deciding what to get.
I went a rather eclectic route. Because Jo Walton's papersky latest book, Among Others came out this week, I ordered it. I don't often buy hardbacks, but I've loved everything I've read by her, including Lifelode, which I nominated for the Mythopoeic Award last year. It won, deservingly so. I've got so many books backed up and waiting for me to read them, but this just went to the top of my fiction pile. I'll probably start it tonight.
I also got a nonfiction book that friends have been raving about (Hi Roberta and Lori!), Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck. I read a bit of it today and did some of the exercises, which are focused on figuring out what you really want out of life as opposed to what you think you should want or society tells you you should want. I'm not usually big on "self-help" type books but this looks really good in terms of just nudging the reader to examine his or her own life and consider some positive changes.
I hadn't quite used up the gift card with those two purchases, so I decided to get something I'd put on my wish list a long time ago but didn't expect to ever buy: Gentle Giant Octopus by Karen Wallace. It's a children's book, but I had put it on my list after doing a search to find my absolute favorite book as a toddler. Because I read a book about an octopus when I was barely able to read at all, the octopus became my favorite animal. I had two stuffed octopuses by the time I was 3, one of them handmade by my parents. The book had beautiful, realistic art and told the story about a day in the life of an octopus: she escapes from predators by squirting ink, finds food, squeezes into a cave to lay eggs, the baby octopuses float away, etc.
This book really sounded like that one, but it didn't look quite right. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. It came out in 1998, so it couldn't have possibly been the right book anyway, but I guess I was hoping it was a later printing of a previous book that had gone out of print. The story is so much like the one I remember that it's hard for me to imagine this author came up with it without having read the previous book. The artwork is nice and more or less realistic, but not as rich as I recall. The language used is nice with some great use of imagery. The octopus "sinks like a huge rubber flower," for example. But it's not the same. I recall something in my old favorite book about the baby octopuses being described like confetti, or at least that is the way they looked floating away in the illustration. It's really a shame when a nice book goes out of print and is replaced by a pale copy. Still, I'm glad to have the book.
I went a rather eclectic route. Because Jo Walton's papersky latest book, Among Others came out this week, I ordered it. I don't often buy hardbacks, but I've loved everything I've read by her, including Lifelode, which I nominated for the Mythopoeic Award last year. It won, deservingly so. I've got so many books backed up and waiting for me to read them, but this just went to the top of my fiction pile. I'll probably start it tonight.
I also got a nonfiction book that friends have been raving about (Hi Roberta and Lori!), Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck. I read a bit of it today and did some of the exercises, which are focused on figuring out what you really want out of life as opposed to what you think you should want or society tells you you should want. I'm not usually big on "self-help" type books but this looks really good in terms of just nudging the reader to examine his or her own life and consider some positive changes.
I hadn't quite used up the gift card with those two purchases, so I decided to get something I'd put on my wish list a long time ago but didn't expect to ever buy: Gentle Giant Octopus by Karen Wallace. It's a children's book, but I had put it on my list after doing a search to find my absolute favorite book as a toddler. Because I read a book about an octopus when I was barely able to read at all, the octopus became my favorite animal. I had two stuffed octopuses by the time I was 3, one of them handmade by my parents. The book had beautiful, realistic art and told the story about a day in the life of an octopus: she escapes from predators by squirting ink, finds food, squeezes into a cave to lay eggs, the baby octopuses float away, etc.
This book really sounded like that one, but it didn't look quite right. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. It came out in 1998, so it couldn't have possibly been the right book anyway, but I guess I was hoping it was a later printing of a previous book that had gone out of print. The story is so much like the one I remember that it's hard for me to imagine this author came up with it without having read the previous book. The artwork is nice and more or less realistic, but not as rich as I recall. The language used is nice with some great use of imagery. The octopus "sinks like a huge rubber flower," for example. But it's not the same. I recall something in my old favorite book about the baby octopuses being described like confetti, or at least that is the way they looked floating away in the illustration. It's really a shame when a nice book goes out of print and is replaced by a pale copy. Still, I'm glad to have the book.