This one is especially for rednekkid :

We were at the Book Thing this afternoon and while wandering through the fiction I came upon a book called Spindrift.  For real!  And it was by a female novelist!  It was not, however, by Lady Florence Craye.

I should have taken it, just so I could shelve it next to Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, but we have too many ( Read more... )

I had to buy my boss a birthday card this afternoon, so I stopped at Bounders Books and Muzak on my way home.  thedeepquiet  has told me they're in trouble financially, so I've decided to make a conscious effort to do my chain bookstore shopping there rather than at Bunns and Noodle.  Bounders  is a better bookstore, and I want Bunns and Noodle to have some ( Read more... )

We just got back from seeing David Sedaris live.  This was my birthday present from thedeepquiet , and it was the Best. Present.  Ever.  I laughed so hard.  If you've been wondering whether it's worth paying to see Sedaris live when you've read (or better yet, listened to) all of his books, the answer is yes.  He did all unpublished material tonight, and he ( Read more... )

Who'da thunk it?

I asked my personal librarian to get me The Host, mostly because I'm a completist, I guess.  It does repeat some unfortunate themes from the Twilight series -- our heroine is once again torn between two lovers, feelin' like a fool, for example -- but I quite liked it.  It even made me cry.

Then I found out there's a sequel in the ( Read more... )

I just read The Price of Salt, Patricia HIghsmith's lesbo classic (originally published in 1951 or 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan).  It's impossible to find in bookstores, so I was thrilled to discover it on Amazon.  It's now published by Norton, as in The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

I thought that was pretty impressive.  But why ( Read more... )

 I just finished reading this sad, beautiful book by Jim Fergus.  The title refers to a proposal that was actually made by a Cheyenne chief in 1854 -- he suggested that the United States give the Cheyenne one thousand white women as brides for Cheyenne warriors.  His theory was that as in Cheyenne culture, a child belongs to his mother's tribe, ( Read more... )

 Or so I surmise from the author photo on her latest release, The Mercedes Coffin.  She's also gone a couple shades lighter with her hair color, which is working for her.  The Botox, not so much.  Actually Jonathan Kellerman was looking pretty Botoxed himself in his most recent jacket photo, if memory serves.  It's so nice when a husband and wife ( Read more... )

I just read Year of Wonders:  A Novel of the Plague, by Geraldine Brooks.  She wrote People of the Book, which I loved, and March, which didn't hold my interest for more than 20 or 30 pages.

Year of Wonders is based on the story of an actual town in England, Eyam (pronounced "Eem"), where there was a bubonic plague outbreak in 1665-66.  The town ( Read more... )

Part one.

So, how to organize the books?  My first thought was that we would look up the Dewey numbers for all the nonfiction on librarything, and shelve them in Dewey order.  We haven't done that . . .  yet.    We  did make some rough categories, though:

Judaica:  this was pretty much all in one place to begin with, but we did some gathering of the ( Read more... )

So I haven't written anything here about the incredibly stupid Twilight series, because I read books 1-3 (in sort of an orgy of I-have-to-know-what-all-these-teenage-girls-are-so-worked-up-about-ness) before I started nerdily blogging every book I read.  Well, by the time I got to the end of book 3, I was so disgusted with the whole thing that I ( Read more... )